Showing results by publisher "BBC Audio" in Women's Fiction

Elizabeth Gaskell was one of Victorian England's pre-eminent female novelists. Admired by Charles Dickens, who described her as his 'dear Scheherazade', she mingled storytelling and social realism to superb effect in her highly acclaimed fiction. This comprehensive collection comprises dramas and readings of her finest works and some lesser-known pieces.

Barbara Pym is one of the 20th-century's wittiest, and most underrated, novelists. Her perceptive comedies of manners, centred around the domestic lives and loves of unassuming middle-class Englishwomen, won her many devoted readers and saw her hailed as a modern-day Jane Austen. Yet she spent 15 years out of print in the 1960s and '70s, until Philip Larkin championed her work in the Times Literary Supplement. Her seventh novel was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and writers from Jilly Cooper to Alexander McCall Smith continue to laud her talent today.

A chilling collection of classic gothic horror and ghost stories adapted or written by women In this breathtaking collection of gothic horror and eerie tales, draw the curtains and pull the blankets close for two classic Victorian horror tales in new adaptations, Dracula starring Nicky Henson...

Irene Bruce spends her days pulling pints in Millport, the only town on the Isle of Cumbrae, a few miles off the west coast of Scotland. Frustrated and going nowhere fast, she yearns to escape to the mainland for a better life - or at least a bit of fun. Just over the water, there are clubs, cinemas and discos, so why is she stuck at home with tea, Scrabble and her boring sister Moira?

A light-hearted comedy drama about a mother, daughter and grandmother living together under one roof – based on the stories by Guardian columnist Michele Hanson What does it feel like to be middle-aged? For Gillian it feels like being twenty-seven in your own head, sixty-five in the mirror...

Dorothy L. Sayers' classic play cycle based on the life and times of Jesus Dorothy L. Sayers was best known for her mystery novels featuring aristocratic amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. But she was also a poet, playwright and committed Christian, and in The Man Born to Be King she combined art...

Inspired by the novels of D.H. Lawrence, particularly The Rainbow and Women in Love, this ambitious quartet from Booker Prize-winning novelist A.S. Byatt charts the lives of the Potter family between 1953 and 1970. Set against the changing social and political landscape of England in the '50s and '60s, it follows the heroine, Frederica, from precocious teenager to TV talk-show host and from her Yorkshire home to the heart of swinging London.

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a prolific author of novels, short stories and poetry, who also wrote a biography of T. H. White, translated Proust and was an authority on Tudor church music. A sharp, insightful storyteller, she was one of the 20th Century's most acute observers of English mores, and her work is infused with subversive themes reflecting her feminist and Marxist views. This comprehensive anthology includes dramatisations of her two best-known novels.

Fifteen highly original and darkly unsettling supernatural stories, performed by some of Britain's finest actresses 'This is what we know about The Hotel. It is bigger on the inside than on the outside. Do not go into Room 63. Doors and windows do not stay in the same places. The Hotel listens...

The eldest of the notorious Mitford sisters, Nancy Mitford was renowned for her comic novels of upper-class life. An aristocrat and socialite, she mingled with the 'Bright Young Things' in interwar London, and went on to satirise their foibles in razor-sharp, wickedly funny prose. Collected here are adaptations of her two best sellers, the semi-autobiographical The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, her delightful biography of Louis XV's chief mistress, and a pair of fascinating programmes exploring her own unconventional life.

Irascible phonetics professor Henry Higgins makes a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that he can train Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle to talk ‘like a lady’ and pass as a duchess at the Ambassador’s Ball. As the day of reckoning approaches, can Eliza convince the assembled aristocrats that she’s one of them? And what will become of her afterwards? This effervescent radio version of Shaw’s classic comedy features a stellar cast, including award-winning comedians Alistair McGowan as Henry Higgins, Morgana Robinson as Eliza Doolittle and Al Murray as Alfred Doolittle.

Patricia Hodge stars as Mattie in Juliet Ace’s four linked dramas, written especially for Patricia’s voice, in which Mattie reflects on her life as a naval wife, an actress and as a mother and daughter. In these funny and beautifully observed performances we come to meet Mattie as she shares...

The radio premiere of Erica Jong's uninhibited feminist classic about female sexuality. Isadora Wing has been married to psycho-analyst Bennett for five years. But she has become restless and yearns for men, for solitude, and for the perfect, guiltless, ‘zipless f**k’. Having overcome her...

The Waves: Terence Davies's dramatisation of Virginia Woolf's story. Episode 1: Louis, Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan and Rhoda recall their childhood and first steps into adulthood.Episode 2: Louis, Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan and Rhoda struggle to come to terms with life after Percival...

This illuminating serial charts the transformation of the young Victoria from spirited teenager to shy young bride to celebrated ruler of Britain and ‘Mother of Europe’. But while her roles changed, her essential nature remained the same: vibrant, passionate, principled and fiercely independent. Through extracts from Victoria’s own diaries and letters, and dramatised episodes featuring the characters closest to her, we are given thrilling insight into the thoughts and feelings of the woman behind the crown - and the secrets of her mind and heart.

Every year, Tess and Maggie meet up to try a different activity, something they've never done together before. This year, it's baking, and for a few hours each Friday afternoon, they put the rest of their lives on hold to make cakes. And not just ordinary cakes, but spectacular, unique and glorious gateaux, to celebrate special occasions and commemorate landmark events. When they help a neighbour in distress, they create their first showstopper - a dark, sultry bitter chocolate cake.

Full-cast dramatisations and original plays and stories from the award-winning author. Bernardine Evaristo won the Booker Prize 2019 with her novel, Girl, Woman, Other and the one-off Women's Prize Outstanding Contribution Award in 2025. The author of ten books, her 2013 novel Mr Loverman was...

Five full-cast dramas by the celebrated Scottish writer Liz Lochhead, plus a short story Liz Lochhead is a widely recognised poet, playwright and performer. She was the Makar, Scotland’s national poet, between 2011 and 2016, and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2015. The six...

Sent away from her poverty-stricken parents in Portsmouth to live with her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, nine-year-old Fanny Price is abruptly transplanted to a new, luxurious home: Mansfield Park. Overwhelmed by the grandeur of her surroundings, she feels out of place—and as she grows up, her spoiled cousins, Tom, Maria and Julia, never let her forget her humble beginnings. Only her cousin Edmund treats her with kindness, and the two become close companions.

When the Reverend Elaine Metcalfe is inducted as the vicar of Pontvale, she hopes the job will have more to it than lending out spare sets of keys. She soon discovers there's plenty of challenges in her new home - not least the daily needs of her parishioners, which range from community theatre productions, arranging a wedding and a funeral for the same day, and local scandal over the vicar's culottes.