It's the relationships that count, constantly shifting and elusive, dependent on a glance, a trick of light, an inflection of tone. Mrs Ramsay is beautiful, Mr Ramsay difficult, their eight children relatively interesting, their house guests more so. The action, such as it is, takes place in the holiday home of the Ramsay family, on a Hebridean island before and after the great war. Just as well, because there isn't much plot. Somehow, though, when it is read in a voice as sensitive and intelligent as Juliet Stevenson's, you appreciate why critics have said that this, her best-known novel, contains some of the most beautiful prose ever written. You either go along with descriptions such as, 'the spring, without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid out on fields, wide-eyed and watchful, and entirely careless of what was done, or thought, by the beholders.', or you don't.

Nicole Kidman in The Hours may have raised the doyenne of Bloomsbury bluestockings literary profile for a new generation of readers, but many people still consider Virginia Woolf's writing difficult and dated. The mood deepens when the neglected house is revisited, post-war, by surviving members of the holiday party, who must ultimately confront 'that loneliness that was the truth about things'.

Other voices (most notably that of unmarried artist Lily Briscoe) fade in and out, and Juliet Stevenson turns this haunting story, in which nothing really happens, into a tone-poem of delicately nuanced probings into human relationships. Hers is the dominant interior monologue of this pre-first-world-war interlude. Mrs Ramsay (wife of a distinguished philosopher, mother of eight, and a sympathetic hostess) provides the heartbeat of a shabby-grand holiday house in the Hebrides and at the same time ceaselessly gauges the secret rhythms of its many intertwined pulses.

To the lighthouse wordsworth classics