AuthorElizabeth Gaskell
NarratorFull Cast
Duration6h 52m
CategoriesAdult Fiction, Classics
PublisherAudio Go Ltd
VersionUnabridged
This BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Elizabeth Gaskell's tale of Manchester life is set in the 19th century when a series of bad harvests placed a heavy tax burden on workers. Gaskell's powerful drama, adapted here for Woman's Hour, is regarded as one of the most important novels of its time.
Author: Elizabeth Gaskell
Author Elizabeth Gaskell
Narrator Jenny Agutter
Duration 2h 20m
Margaret Hale moves from the country into the inner-city and starts to learn what life is like for the workers. Elizabeth Gaskell highlights the difference between the middle and working classes in this tale set in the time of the Industrial Revolution. A largely autobiographical story, she also highlights the good that each group can do for each...
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Author: Elizabeth Gaskell
Author Elizabeth Gaskell
Narrator Clare Wille
Duration 18h 35m
This is one of the earliest novels of British industrial alienation, tellingly linked to the plight of 19th-century women. It tells of the relationship between Margaret Hale, a girl from the old rural south, and John Thornton, a mill owner from the new industrial north.
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Author: Charles Dickens
Author Charles Dickens
Narrator Simon Vance
Duration 31h 21m
The most gorgeously theatrical of all Dickens's novels, Nicholas Nickleby follows the delightful adventures of a hearty young hero in nineteenth-century England. Nicholas, a gentleman's son fallen upon hard times, must set out to make his way in the world. His journey is accompanied by some of the most swaggering scoundrels and unforgettable eccent...
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Author: Emile Zola
Author Emile Zola
Narrator Leighton Pugh
Duration 19h 55m
Germinal is one of the most striking novels in the French tradition. Widely regarded as Zola's masterpiece, the novel describes the working conditions of French coalminers in the 1860s in harsh and realistic terms it is visceral, graphic and unrelenting. Its strong socialist principles and vivid accounts of the miners' strikes meant that the novel...
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Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Author Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Narrator Various
Duration 1h 32m
Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Jessica Brown Findlay, Jamael Westman and Sheila Atim. 'The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing' Written with barely controlled fury after she was confined to her room for 'nerves' and forbidden to write, Gilman's pioneer...
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Best of Women's Short Stories 2
Author: Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Kate Chopin, Winifred Holtby, L. M. Montgomery, Mary Shelley, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf
Author Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Kate Chopin, Winifred Holtby, L. M. Montgomery, Mary Shelley, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf
Narrator Harriet Walter
Duration 5h 2m
Jane Austen makes two appearances on this brilliant collection that also includes such revered writers as Mary Shelly and Virginia Woolf. With stories ranging from tear-jerkers to passionate tales of love and jealousy, this collection has something for everyone, young or old, male or female.
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Author: Kenneth Grahame
Author Kenneth Grahame
Narrator Alan Bennett
Duration 1h 17m
When the Water Rat invites the unassuming Mole to spend his first day ever in a boat on the river, and wise Badger comes along for the ride as well, so begins a marvellous season of adventure for the three friends. Mr Toad (he of Toad Hall) completes a happy foursome, but his tendency to get into hot water leads him into some rather hair-raising sc...
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Author: Elizabeth Gaskell
Author Elizabeth Gaskell
Narrator Deborah McAndrew, Emerald O'Hanrahan
Duration 2h 15m
A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Elizabeth Gaskell's classic novel of everyday provincial life in the 1820s, Wives and Daughters, first broadcast in the Woman's Hour Drama slots from 29 November 2010 - 10 December 2010. Wives and Daughters was written in the 1860s and serialised in the Cornhill Magazine. It is set in the 1820s and deals to...
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Author: Albert Camus
Author Albert Camus
Narrator James Jenner
Duration 11h 2m
In the small coastal city of Oran, Algeria, rats begin rising up from the filth only to die as bloody heaps in the streets. Shortly after, an outbreak of the bubonic plague erupts and envelops the human population. Albert Camus' The Plague is a brilliant and haunting rendering of human perseverance and futility in the face of a relentless terror bo...
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Author: Emile Zola
Author Emile Zola
Narrator Traci Svensgaard
Duration 6h 41m
In a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, Th‚rŠse Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on a turbulent affair with her husband's earthy friend, Laurent. But their passion for each other soon compels the lovers to commit a crime t...
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