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The Tragic Muse, Volume 1
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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- Narrated by: Adam Sims
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
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"To inherit a great fortune. To inherit a great misfortune." These words, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's notebook, neatly encapsulate the theme of The House of the Seven Gables - that of a family whose fortunes are poisoned by its past misdeeds. The sins of the Pyncheon father are visited upon his children over a period of several generations, until such time as one of his descendants unites with a member of the family he has wronged. Love conquers hate, and new blood washes away the original crime.
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- By: Edith Wharton
- Narrated by: Eleanor Bron
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 123
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 87
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Beautiful, sophisticated and endlessly ambitious Lily Bart endeavours to climb the social ladder of New York's elite by securing a good match and living beyond her means. Now nearing 30 years of age and having rejected several proposals, forever in the hope of finding someone better, her future prospects are threatened. A damning commentary of 20th-century social order, Edith Wharton's tale established her as one of the greatest British novelists of the 1900s.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
- By Valerie Harris on 19-12-08
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The Woman in White
- By: Wilkie Collins
- Narrated by: Ian Holm
- Length: 24 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,025
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 889
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 884
Late one moonlit night, Walter Hartright encounters a solitary and terrified woman dressed all in white. He saves her from capture by her pursuers and determines to solve the mystery of her distress and terror. Inspired by an actual criminal case, this gripping tale of murder, intrigue, madness and mistaken identity has never been out of print since its publication and brought Collins great fame and success.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fantastic
- By Anthony on 13-01-11
-
The Mill on the Floss
- By: George Eliot
- Narrated by: Eileen Atkins
- Length: 19 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 56
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 30
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 30
'If life had no love in it, what else was there for Maggie?' The Mill on the Floss, first published in 1860, is considered one of George Eliot's most autobiographical works. Having formed a complex bond with her own family, George Eliot, now known to the public as Mary Ann Evans, depicts the loving yet volatile relationship between the Tulliver siblings and their doting father. Spanning over a period of 10 years, The Mill on the Floss follows the coming of age of the beautiful and idealistic Maggie.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Editor reviews
Henry James, in his preface to The Tragic Muse, remarks that he’d long wanted to write about the artist's life and "the general question of its having to be not altogether easily paid for". To this end he describes two young artists' journeys toward self-fulfillment. There’s Nick, the young aspiring painter who must come to terms with his family's desire for him to go into politics. Parallel to Nick is Miriam whom he paints as "the tragic muse" and who devotes herself without reservation to her own art, acting. Victor Villar-Hauser’s eager and earnest performance captures this deeply personal view of the artist’s place in the world.
This is volume one the work, which was originally published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly.Summary
"You must paint her just like that... as the Tragic Muse," suggests one of James' characters to Nick Dormer, the young Englishman who, during the course of the novel, will courageously resist the glittering Parliamentary career desired for him by his family, in order to paint. His progress is counterpointed by the "Tragic Muse" of the title, Miriam Rooth, one of James' most fierily beautiful creations, a great actress indifferent to social reputation and triumphantly dedicated to her art.
In portraying the conflict between art and "the world", which is his novel's central idea, James engaged obliquely with current debates on the new aestheticism of Pater and Wilde and on the nature of the actor's performance. Through the living complexity of his protagonists, he reveals how much, as Philip Horne puts it, "to take art seriously as an end in itself...is still a provocative course."
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Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
- Yao
- 11-02-11
impossibly bad reader
Seriously, this is the worst reader I have ever heard. The voice is very fine and the accent is perfect for James but he doesn't seem to understand what he is reading. The inflection is sing-song - pitched and paced seemingly without regard to the meaning of sentence or word. Ninety-percent of the time the reader puts emphasis on the wrong syllable of a word and/or the wrong word in a sentence. Luckily, the reading is slow enough to allow a listener to sort out the word-puzzle sentence by sentence without falling behind. At first I honestly thought the reading style was some sort of conceptual play on the bad acting of the Miriam Ruth character - I soon realized it was just a terrible performance by the reader - as though he were reading from a book that had only one word per page-turn and could only guess the likely role each word might play in a sentence before flipping the page to read the next - it was torture.
12 of 12 people found this review helpful