Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Things I Don't Want to Know by Deborah Levy, read by Juliet Stevenson.Things I Don't Want to Know is the first in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography' on writing and womanhood.Taking George Orwell's famous essay, 'Why I Write', as a jumping-off point, Deborah Levy offers her own indisp...

In this follow up to Call the Midwife, Jennifer Worth, a midwife working in the docklands area of East London in the 1950s, tells more stories about the people she encountered. There's Jane, who cleaned and generally helped out at Nonnatus House - she was taken to the workhouse as a baby and was allegedly the illegitimate daughter of an aristocrat....

Jennifer Worth came from a sheltered background when she became a midwife in the Docklands in the 1950s. The conditions in which many women gave birth just half a century ago were horrifying, not only because of their grimly impoverished surroundings, but also because of what they were expected to endure. But while Jennifer witnessed brutality and...

When Catherine Morland, a country clergyman's daughter, is invited to spend a season in Bath with the fashionable high society, little does she imagine the delights and perils that await her. Captivated and disconcerted by what she finds, and introduced to the joys of 'Gothic novels' by her new friend, Isabella, Catherine longs for mystery and roma...

Mrs Harris is a salt-of-the-earth London charlady who cheerfully cleans the houses of the rich. One day, when tidying Lady Dant's wardrobe, she comes across the most beautiful thing she has ever seen in her life - a Dior dress. In all the years of her drab and humble existence, she's never seen anything as magical as the dress before her and she's...

During the summer of her GCSEs Kite's world falls apart when her best friend, Dawn, commits suicide. Kite senses Dawn's spirit around her and it's not until she meets local boy, Garth, that Kite begins to open up - talking to a stranger is easier somehow. Kite would do anything to speak to Dawn just once more, to understand why. Otherwise how can s...

When young Lucy Graham marries Sir Michael Audley, all seems well and good. Sir Michael is thoroughly devoted to his new bride and Lady Audley takes great pride in her privileged position at Audley Court. But Sir Michael's daughter, Alicia, is frustrated and uncomfortable with her new stepmother's girlish ways. Shortly afterwards, Sir Michael's nep...

Lucy Honeychurch, accompanied by her vigilant guardian, Charlotte Bartlett, makes her first foray into the world, touring Italy and discovering a country very different to the English countryside she was brought up in. Torn between two lovers, she has to make a decision that will transform her from a girl to a woman. A talented pianist with a good...

A young man's suicide doesn't put paid to a young lady's ideas of going to a dance, despite the derision of her chaperone, who suspects that she is, at least in part, to blame. On the journey, a great breeze whips up in the ladies' carriage, and the young lady suffers a mishap, and auditory hallucinations...what is happening, and can it be explaine...

Classic story from the author of The Woman In White, a young woman finds herself caught between true love and her family's honor

The aristocratic Anna Karenina is a sophisticated woman who seems to have everything - beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. Yet she becomes increasingly aware of the emptiness of her life and exchanges her privilaged existence as the wife of Karenin for a passionate affair with the impetuous Count Vronsky - with tragic consequences.

Loretta, Mary, Anne and Sylvia are four young women who belong to a sisterhood composed of superior women, who for various reasons, determine to remain single and devote themselves to earnest work. They, do not rush into marriage recklessly like other young girls, who fear being single and perhaps penniless or uncared for. They enjoy their liberty...

Virginia Woolf's pioneering work on women in literature. An accessible yet fiercely astute essay, it is a crystallisation of the intelligent analysis behind her novels, and confirms her as a writer not only of style, but of undeniable substance. Ranging from discussing Austen's pandering to a male writing style, to imagining the dreadful fate of Sh...

In London in the 1950s, novelist Anna Wulf struggles with writer's block. Divorced with a young child, and fearful of going mad, Anna records her experiences in four coloured notebooks: black for her writing life, red for political views, yellow for emotions, blue for everyday events. But it is a fifth notebook-the golden notebook -that finally pul...

Serena Frome, the beautiful daughter of an Anglican bishop, has a brief affair with an older man during her final year at Cambridge, and finds herself being groomed for the intelligence services. The year is 1972. Britain, confronting economic disaster, is being torn apart by industrial unrest and terrorism and faces its fifth state of emergency. T...

Fanny Price's rich relatives offer her a place in their home so that she can be properly brought up. However, Fanny's childhood is a lonely one as she is never allowed to forget her place. Her only ally is her cousin Edmund. When her cousins befriend two glamorous new young people who have arrived in the area, Henry and Mary Crawford, Edmund starts...

The Voyage Out is Virginia Woolf's haunting tale about a naive young woman's sea voyage from London to a small resort on the South American coast. Told in symbolic, lyrical and intoxicating prose, her outward journey begins to mirror her internal voyage into adulthood as she searches for her personal identity, grapples with love, and learns how to...

Dorothea Brooke is a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage with a pedantic scholar. Tertius Lydgate is a charming but tactless doctor. His marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and his pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career. Their interweaving tales reveal a complex...

Clarissa Dalloway is civilised - without the ostentation of a socialite, but with enough distinction to attract them to her parties. She finds excess offensive, but surrounds herself with the highest quality and has an abhorrence for anything ugly or awkward. We spend a day with Clarissa as she interacts with servants, her children, her husband, an...

Arrogant, self-willed and egotistical, Emma is Jane Austen's most unusual heroine. Her interfering ways and inveterate matchmaking are at once shocking and comic. She is `handsome, clever and rich' and has `a disposition to think too well of herself'. When she decides to introduce the humble Harriet Smith to the delights of genteel society and to f...

A classic love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities. At 19, Anne Eliot is persuaded to jilt her suitor-Captain Frederick Wentworth-because he has neither rank nor fortune. When they encounter one another eight years later will she make the same mistake again?