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Shop nowThe Poor Clare
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Learn moreOriginally written for Charles Dickens’ Household Words magazine, The Poor Clare is a dark, gothic short novel of thwarted love and a family curse that vividly illustrates the social tensions of Victorian England.
The intentional killing of a woman’s dog unleashes a torrent of rage. In her desire for revenge, the woman curses the dog’s killer: All that the murderer loves most, he will lose.
This haunting tale brilliantly demonstrates Elizabeth Gaskell’s understanding of the tensions between Catholics and Protestants and the harsh realities of class society.
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865) was an English novelist and short-story writer born in London and raised in Knutsford, Cheshire, which became the model for village settings in her novels. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister. Her first novel, Mary Barton, published in 1848, was immensely popular and brought her to the attention of Charles Dickens, who solicited her work for his periodical, Household Words, for which she wrote the series subsequently reprinted as Cranford.
Derek Perkins is a professional narrator and voice actor. He has earned numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration, as well as numerous Society of Voice Arts nominations. AudioFile magazine named him a Best Voice consecutively in 2014, 2015, and 2016. Augmented by a knowledge of three foreign languages and a facility with accents, he has narrated numerous titles in a wide range of fiction and nonfiction genres.
Reviews
“Gaskell’s supernatural tale depicts the haunting of young Lucy Gisborne by an evil double. After a supposed witch indirectly curses Lucy for her father’s crime, she finds herself abandoned by all close to her except for one friend and her admirer, a lawyer who also serves as the novel’s narrator. Derek Perkins’s narration embodies the narrator’s balance of reserve and passion. He often reveals the young man’s emotions through a quickening of pace. Although much of story is retold in a secondhand account, Perkins re-creates the characters faithfully when they do speak. He is particularly forceful in the few lines spoken by the mysterious Bridget, in which he uses a sharp Irish brogue. While this is a relatively short audiobook, Perkins is engaging throughout.”
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