Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting

Send as gift Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

Gothic Tales

by Elizabeth Gaskell

Narrator Olivia Forrest

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more

Length 16 hours 25 minutes

Language English

Send as gift Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

Summary
About the author

Brought to you by Penguin.

This Penguin Classic is performed by Olivia Forrest. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Laura Keanzler.

Elizabeth Gaskell's chilling Gothic tales blend the real and the supernatural to eerie, compelling effect. 'Disappearances', inspired by local legends of mysterious vanishings, mixes gossip and fact; 'Lois the Witch', a novella based on an account of the Salem witch hunts, shows how sexual desire and jealousy lead to hysteria; while in 'The Old Nurse's Story' a mysterious child roams the freezing Northumberland moors. Whether darkly surreal, such as 'The Poor Clare', where an evil doppelgänger is formed by a woman's bitter curse, or mischievous like 'Curious, if True', a playful reworking of fairy tales, all the stories in this volume form a stark contrast to the social realism of Gaskell's novels, revealing a darker and more unsettling style of writing.

© Laura Kranzler 2000 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Classics Fiction Mystery & Thriller Short Stories

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65) wrote her first novel, MARY BARTON, in 1848 as a distraction from her sorrow at the death of her only son in infancy. It won the attention of Dickens and was followed by 5 other full-length novels as well as numerous short stories and novellas.

Laura Kranzler has written on Mary Shelley and Virginia Woolf and has published a novel.