AuthorElizabeth Gaskell
NarratorJenny Agutter
Duration2h 20m
CategoriesAdult Fiction, Classics
Key StageA Level
PublisherCSA Word
VersionAbridged
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 other, and the friendships and understandings that can blossom between two seemingly irreconcilable means and modes of life. Gaskell shows her great love of people, and of love itself, in this touching and enlightening tale.
Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Author Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Narrator Richard E. Grant
Duration 2h 12m
He is the Little Prince, the mysterious, innocent and beautiful boy who appears to a pilot stranded in the desert and makes an extraordinary request. He has captured the hearts of millions of readers around the world since his story first appeared in 1943, written down by an aristocratic French aviator who soon after disappeared during a flight acr...
View Book
Author: Elizabeth Gaskell
Author Elizabeth Gaskell
Narrator Clare Wille
Duration 7h 2m
In the village of Cranford, decorum is maintained at all times. Despite their poverty, the ladies are never vulgar about money (or their lack of it), and always follow the rules of propriety. But this discretion and gentility does not keep away tragedy; and when the worst happens, the Amazons of Cranford show the true strength of their honest affec...
View Book
Author: Elizabeth Gaskell
Author Elizabeth Gaskell
Narrator Full Cast
Duration 6h 52m
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.
View Book
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...
View Book
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.
View Book
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...
View Book
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...
View Book
Author: Charlotte Bronte
Author Charlotte Bronte
Narrator Charlotte Ritchie
Duration 21h 29m
Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Charlotte Ritchie, best known for her roles as Oregon in Channel 4's Fresh Meat, Hannah in the BBC Three comedy Siblings, and as Barbara Gilbert in BBC drama Call the Midwife. With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding sch...
View Book
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.
View Book
Author: Jonathan Swift
Author Jonathan Swift
Narrator Jasper Britton
Duration 35h 15m
Lemuel Gulliver, a slightly staid ship's doctor, relates the tales of his astonishing travels. He encounters the tiny, warring Lilliputians; the giant, sceptical Brobdingnagians; the ludicrously intellectual Laputans; and the idealistic - if rather stolid - Houyhnhnms and their bestial servants, the Yahoos. An immediate best-seller when it was firs...
View Book
