Literary Criticism

The Mayor of Casterbridge

by Thomas Hardy Read by Bruce Pirie 4.7
Irritated and drunken, an itinerant farm-worker sells his wife and child to a stranger. Thus begins The Mayor of Casterbridge, set in rural …

Notes From The Underground

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Read by Bob Neufeld 4.8
Notes from Underground is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is considered by many to be the first existentialist novel. It presen…

Bleak House

by Charles Dickens Read by Peter John Keeble 4.9
Bleak house is one of Dickens finest achievements. It was written for serialisation in 1853 when Dickens was at the peak of his career. Mont…

The Man in the Iron Mask

by Alexandre Dumas Read by Mark F. Smith 4.6
In this, the last of the Three Musketeers novels, Dumas builds on the true story of a mysterious prisoner held incognito in the French penal…

The Awakening

by Kate Chopin Read by Elizabeth Klett 4.4
Kate Chopin's 1899 novella The Awakening is about the personal, sexual, and artistic awakening of a young wife and mother, Edna Pontellier. …

The Jungle

by Upton Sinclair Read by Tom Weiss 4.6
It is the end of the 19th century. Like thousands of others, the Rudkus family has emigrated from Lithuania to America in search of a better…

Heart of Darkness

by Joseph Conrad Read by Bob Neufeld 4.6
Heart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad. Before its 1903 publication, it appeared as a three-part series (1899) in Blackwood…

Dubliners

by James Joyce Read by Tadhg 4.7
Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. They form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle cl…

The Warden

by Anthony Trollope Read by Nick Whitley 4.7
The Warden is the first novel in Anthony Trollope's series known as the "Chronicles of Barsetshire", making fun of the Church of E…

Fathers and Sons

by Ivan Turgenev Read by Roger Melin 4.6
The fathers and children of the novel refers to the growing divide between the two generations of Russians, and the character Yevgeny Bazaro…

Daniel Deronda

by George Eliot Read by Becky Miller 4.6
In this enduring Victorian classic written in 1876, two stories weave in and out of each other: The first is about Gwendolen, one of Eliot's…

The House of the Dead

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Read by Expatriate 4.6
The House of the Dead is a novel published in 1861 by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which portrays the life of convicts in a Siberian p…

Jude the Obscure

by Thomas Hardy Read by Tadhg 4.6
Eleven-year-old Jude Fawley, inspired by his teacher Mr. Phillotson, who leaves Marygreen for Christminster to take a university degree, dec…

The Doctor's Wife

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon Read by Kirsten Wever 4.1
This is one of the Victorian “Sensationist” Mary Elizabeth Braddon's many novels (best known among them: “Lady Audley’s Secret”). It is extr…

The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne

by William John Locke Read by Simon Evers 4.7
Marcus Ordeyne is a middle aged bachelor schoolmaster who has inherited both money and a title and thus is able to lead a life of leisure. O…

The Death of Ivan Ilyitch

by Leo Tolstoy Read by Laurie Anne Walden 4.7
The Death of Ivan Ilyitch is the story of a socially ambitious middle-aged judge who contracts an unexplained and untreatable illness. As I…

The Touchstone

by Edith Wharton Read by Elizabeth Klett 4.3
Stephen Glennard's career is falling apart and he desperately needs money so that he may marry his beautiful fiancee. He happens upon an adv…

Mrs. Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf Read by Hannah Dormor 4.7
Clarissa Dalloway is having a party. Join her and a web of connections in exploring London, their memories and their innermost thoughts and …

The Glory of Clementina Wing

by William John Locke Read by Simon Evers 4.7
The book follows the adventures of two main characters - Clementina Wing, a talented artist in her mid 30's with no social graces and Ephrai…

Master and Man

by Leo Tolstoy Read by Brooks Jensen 4.8
A land owner, Vasili Andreevich, takes along one of his peasants, Nikita, for a short journey to another town. He wishes to get to the town …

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