Showing results by narrator "Alice Johnson" in All Categories

Jane Austen's first published novel and much loved masterpiece. Two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood - the former sensible, the latter impulsive - both fall in love with men whose affections are otherwise engaged or, as in one case, are simply unreliable. The great pleasure for the listener is reveling in the author's wonderful prose and hearing all of this tangled mess (with many great supporting characters) become untangled in both very funny and deeply moving ways.

"Ethan Frome" is set in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts, where a visiting engineer tells the story of his encounter with Ethan Frome, a man with a history of thwarted dreams and desires. The accumulated longing of Frome ends in an ironic turn of events. His initial impressions are based on his observations of Frome going about his mundane tasks in Starkfield, and something about him catches the eye and curiosity of the visitor, but no one in the town seems interested in revealing many details about the man or his history - or perhaps they are not able to.

A man, our "hero", Stephen, needs to come up with a way to make a more money in order to be able to marry his beloved. He has in his possession a pile of old love letters from a famous writer, deceased, at this time. She was called Margaret and was very much in love with Stephen. He finds out he can make lots of profits were he to have the letters published; but he hesitates because he had never really loved her, and had not treated her very well.

"Howards End" is a novel by English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist E. M. Forster. It was first published in 1910. "Howards End" is considered by some to be Forster's masterpiece. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked "Howards End" 38th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It's about social conventions, codes of conduct, and personal relationships in turn-of-the-century England. This is also a story of difference between the middle class and the poor.

Helen Eskdale and rich Lord Teviot seem to be the match made in heaven. But when they marry, they find that misunderstandings and jealousies plague everything. Will their marriage and love survive the infernal manipulations of a rather large and eccentric entourage? This lovely, observantly comedic work plays in many ways like a sort of "Jane Austen light"!

Austen's last novel, published posthumously. A timeless masterpiece, rich in everything: keen observation, characterizations, wonderful prose and a meaty plot and subplot(s)... in short, everything that we expect from and love about the great author! Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth meet and fall in love; but Anne's entourage, especially mentor Lady Russell persuade her not to act on her feelings, as the deem the young naval officer not suitable.

This is a cult classic in the gothic horror and suspense genre! Our hero Richard is a young Englishman abroad in Napoleonic-era France. He falls in love with a mysterious and endangered Countess, whom he glimpsed behind her black veil. To be close to her, he checks into a room in the Dragon Volant (the Flying Dragon), a haunted hotel that has seen many mysterious disappearances.

"The House of the Vampire" is one of the first psychic vampire stories ever - where the vampire feeds off of more than just blood. The story was written by German-American poet and writer George Sylvester Viereck (1884-1962).

Our heroine Kate is madly in love with her fiancé. She is planning their wedding and future life together... Unfortunately, she discovers a secret that he has that will forever change what she thinks of him. With this new insight, she toils with her desire to be morally accountable, and for him to "do the right thing". Much later in life, she finds herself in a very similar situation, only this time with her own son... A gripping and fascinating novella about the so called "Gilded Age", by one of the true masters of the genre.

"Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one." Just as in this quote from this powerful work of gothic mystery and suspense by the master author, the listener is sucked in and put under a spell!

This is a powerful and tragic work by the masterful author about a girl's sexual awakening. Of course, there are consequences involved; she is a poor girl in a small western New England town. This book deals with both sexuality and class distinction and touches on incest as well. While these topics are more or less openly debated today, they were considered scandalous at the time of publication.

"Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort" is a collection of magazine articles by the American writer Edith Wharton on her time in France during the First World War, including her visits to the French sectors of the Western Front. The individual articles originally appeared in Scribner's Magazine in 1915. Part of the "The War on All Fronts" series, the book was published in 1918.