Sprig Muslin

Gossip, scandal and an unforgettable Regency romance

By: Georgette Heyer

Narrated by: Amelia Donkor

Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's Summary

Brought to you by Penguin. 

He thought he could set her on a better path. But they might both wander astray....

Sir Gareth Ludlow never truly recovered from the death of his fiancée. Years later, a chance encounter with Amanda, a young and devastatingly pretty runaway, inspires him to try to do the right thing and to set her on a path towards a good life.

But Sir Gareth has been neck-deep in a life of debauchery and hedonism ever since his fiancée's death, and Amanda's startlingly lively imagination proves to be more than he'd bargained for. As they both become increasingly entangled in Sir Gareth's scheme, it seems more and more difficult for either of them to lead the life they should....

A witty and delightful historical novel, Sprig Muslin shows why Georgette Heyer has such a huge and devoted readership to this day.

©1956 Georgette Heyer (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Wonderful Heyer but weird narration

I’m a huge Heyer fan and enjoyed this recording for the sake of the story. But the narration was strangely weird, stilted and clunky.

At first hearing the narrator has a lovely, refined voice and nice English accent. However she has zero story-telling skills. She maintains a flat monotone throughout the book and never varies her voice for any of the emotions of the characters so it comes across as artificial.

Worse, she seems to have no idea when a sentence starts or finishes and will often stop mid-sentence then start a new phrase on a random word that clearly belonged to the words before she paused, This gives a very stilted feel to the narration and makes the story less easy to follow.

Worst of all, her pronunciations are often laughably wrong, it’s as if she’s never seen a Regency BBC drama in her life! For example instead of pronouncing “Mama” and “Papa” with the stress on the second syllable and a long “ah” sound on the end, she says “Mamma” and “Pappa”. This really grates.
Her worst mistake is when one character calls Amanda a “little Puss” as in an affectionate term for a cat but she says “little pus” as in an infected sore lol.

I will regretfully he returning this due to the incompetent narration. What a pity

Poor narration!

I'm adding my voice to those who have already criticised the narration for this book. According to my research, the narrator is a British actress. She certainly has some sort of UK regional accent, I have no doubt that she is very skilled - just not in this field or genre.
Multiple mispronunciations, among which the most annoying are "Mumma, and Pappa" instead of MaMA and PaPA. I sometimes thought that she was reading at a sub secondary school level for some of the pronunciations.
Another frustrating element (unfortunately also noticeable with some other female narrators) is the difficulty in lowering the pitch of her voice enough to quote male characters convincingly. Her Sir Gareth sounded so insipid!
Please Audible / Penguin, could this book be redone? Phyllida Nash, Cornelius Garret, Thomas Judd would be good choices in my opinion.

Historical romance classic

Another Georgette Heyer classic story. It was well narrated and with a very satisfactory conclusion.

Disappointingly bland reading of a brilliant novel

Georgette Heyer is a brilliantly witty writer and her novels never fail to make me laugh out loud. What a shame the narrator seems not to understand half of the words or phrases. How could she think that the word 'Mama', as a well-to-do regency child would call their mother, rhymes with ' hammer' for example?!
The narration by Sian Philips that used to be on Audible is SO much better. Georgette Heyer should be read by someone like Phyllada Nash or Cornelius Garret, or at least someone who understands the style of writing and can properly impart the wit.

poor narrator

The narrator annoyingly mispronounced a number of words and didn't pace the sentences properly

Story, as usual with Heyer, is brilliant, but the reader is atrocious

The reader is really bad. For instance, the word is Mama, not Moma and Papa, not Popa. Also all the A’s were flat, the word mischievous was wrongly pronounced as were a number of other words. The delivery was stilted with wrong intonation throughout.

The narration was so awful I couldn't listen to it

This is the worst narration I have ever heard, who doesn't know how to pronounce mama!! I couldn't even get 1 chapter in, the narrator pauses mid sentence, adds names on to the end of sentences after long pauses which makes the characters sound stupid. I am currently requesting to return this book. So disappointed.

Badly narrated

Very sad that the book was read with so many mistakes/mispronunciations, as others have noticed. It was really distracting!

Wooden Reading.

A goodish story ruined by wooden reading and very poor pronunciation, particularly of place names.

Wonderful Heyer, another disappointing narrator

Yet again, a classic Heyer read by someone who mispronounces many words. Some, like 'mama' and 'papa' show an ignorance of upperclass pronunciation, but words like 'valise', 'disreputable', 'babble' and others? These errors jar the listening experience.
This is highly typical of this new series of Heyer romances. Where is the quality control? Do the producers listen to the recordings at all?
I recommend searching for the old Phyllida Nash recordings. Flawless narration of wonderful stories.

Dreadfully punctuated reading!

This is a lovely book from Heyer but is spoilt by very poor reading where commas are treated as full stops and the flow of the text is all wrong!!

Performance

Terrible reading style. I ended up re-saying the spoken parts in my head. The narrator did not do the author any favours with the way she read this.

Too many mispronunciations - find another narrator

Love the story, but too many words mispronunced by the narrator to be able to relax into it fully and her reading just didn't flow. A shame as I wanted to love it, and thr story is great. Suggest you find a different narrator