Germinal - Annotated

By: Émile Zola

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Length: 19 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

This is a new edition of “Germinal,” originally published in 1895 by Leonard Smithers for The Lutetian Society, of London, translated by Havelock Ellis. Part of the project Immortal Literature Series of classic literature, this is a new edition of the classic work published in 1895—not a facsimile reprint. Obvious typographical errors have been carefully corrected and the entire text has been reset and redesigned by Pen House Editions to enhance readability, while respecting the original edition. The eBook edition was designed in an elegant style and set to take full advantage of the readers' features. “Germinal,” a bleak but nevertheless fascinatingly realistic and intriguing novel, tells the story of a coal-mining community in mid-nineteenth-century France. The main protagonist is a young man, Étienne Lantier, who arrives at the fictional town of Montsou, in northern France, near the Belgium border, looking for a job. He finds work as a miner, having to labor long hours under miserable conditions. Passionate about socialism, and seeing the hopeless lives of his fellow miners—having to put up with reduced wages, harsh working conditions, and hunger—he ends up leading them to a violent strike. Thanks to Leonard Smithers (1861-1907)—a London publisher associated with the Decadent movement—and his Lutetian Society—a secret literary society—translators such as Havelock Ellis were able to provide British readers with translations of some of Émile Zola’s controversial novels, aiming at expanding the cultural horizons of the few lucky readers who had access to them. Considered by the overwhelming majority of critics as the best translator of Zola’s “Germinal,” Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) was a social activist, a physician and a psychologist, whose best-known works concern sexuality and criminology. In 1890 he published “The Criminal,” a remarkable work on criminal anthropology. In 1897, he co-authored, with John Addington Symonds, “Sexual Inversion,” the first medical text in English about homosexuality, another of his masterpieces.