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The Bronte Cabinet
- Three Lives in Nine Objects
- Narrated by: Esther Wane
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
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Publisher's Summary
An intimate portrait of the lives and writings of the Brontë sisters, drawn from the objects they possessed. In this unique and lovingly detailed biography of a literary family that has enthralled readers for nearly two centuries, Victorian literature scholar Deborah Lutz illuminates the complex and fascinating lives of the Brontës through the things they wore, stitched, wrote on, and inscribed. By unfolding the histories of the meaningful objects in their family home in Haworth, Lutz immerses listeners in a nuanced re-creation of the sisters' daily lives while moving us chronologically forward through the major biographical events: the death of their mother and two sisters, the imaginary kingdoms of their childhood writing, their time as governesses, and their determined efforts to make a mark on the literary world.
From the miniature books they made as children to the blackthorn walking sticks they carried on solitary hikes on the moors, each personal possession opens a window onto the sisters' world, their beloved fiction, and the Victorian era. A description of the brass collar worn by Emily's bull mastiff, Keeper, leads to a series of entertaining anecdotes about the influence of the family's dogs on their writing and about the relationship of Victorians to their pets in general. The sisters' portable writing desks prove to have played a crucial role in their writing lives: it was Charlotte's snooping in Emily's desk that led to the sisters' first publication in print, followed later by the publication of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.
Charlotte's letters provide insight into her relationships, both innocent and illicit, including her relationship with the older professor to whom she wrote passionately. And the bracelet Charlotte had made of Anne and Emily's intertwined hair bears witness to her profound grief after their deaths. Lutz captivatingly shows the Brontës anew by bringing us deep inside the physical world in which they lived and from which their writings took inspiration.
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What listeners say about The Bronte Cabinet
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Melanie
- 03-14-16
Fascinating concept - shame about the inaccurate pronunciations !
This is examination of the lives of the Brontës through some of their personal possessions. It is a well-written and well researched book - with fascinating insights into the private lives of this amazing family in the context of their times. As a Brontë-phile for many years, I found many new and perceptive angles that I had not come across before. However, the narrator's lack of preparation really spoils the listening experience. Firstly, she pronounces the world-famous village of Haworth, as 'Hay-worth', then struggles with the pronunciation of laudanum.
The word 'Papa' makes Mr Brontë sound as though he comes from the Deep South - Ms Windsor puts the stress on the first syllable instead of the second.
She is unaware that the first name 'St John' is not pronounced as 'Saint John' and hasn't worked out that the 'm' in M. Paul Emmanuel, stands for 'Monsieur '. Appalling ! If I was Deborah Lutz I'd be very disappointed.
It's a real shame. I wish I had stuck with the print version !
5 people found this helpful
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- Blake's Tyger
- 08-20-17
Brilliant Book - Abominable Narrator
What a strange experience listening to this audiobook is.
Fantastic book - material objects and the light they shed on culture. I have read so many books about the Brontes, over four decades maybe every major thing published. This book is right up my street - brilliantly researched, well written and actually full of material I haven't encountered elsewhere.
But where on earth did you find that narrator? I actually checked I hadn't accidentally got the 'robot' narration, she is so poor! How could anyone with such an 'educated' sounding voice, be so ignorant they can't pronounce simple names and placenames like "Keighley", "Haworth", and "Nussey"? (As well as some other spectacular malapropisms - I wish I'd taken notes!)
I was listening to this whilst my husband was still half asleep, this morning, and "Noosey" actually made him laugh so hard he nearly choked.
Unbelievable. I have checked again. Nope, not a robot.
Words like Haworth and Keighley are, you'd have thought, slightly central to the Brontes' story.
And what a shame such an appalling narration distracts from a fantastic book. Sadly it does as I made the unusual decision of buying the Audible book first when I normally buy on Kindle or a print version.
Please please publisher, re-record this with.. you know, someone who can actually... read.
I can't review what seems like a fabulous book, with such atrocious narration standing in the way. This is too embarrassing to listen to, in front of other people.
Awful, awful, awful narrator. To paraphrase Jane Eyre's teacher... "Abominable!"
3 people found this helpful
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- Luisa A.
- 02-03-19
Not for Bronte experts
If one is already a true Brontë fan and avid reader, there's not much here they won't have already read. For everybody else, it's certainly helpful.
2 people found this helpful
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- Alfred
- 10-19-18
Fantastic book!
Highly recommend to those interested in the Brontes as well as all things Victorian. Loved the cultural background explanations, like postal reform which affected Charlotte's letter writing. I only wish it had a pdf file with with illustration of the objects discussed!
I wonder if the previous reviewers listened to a different version from mine, but Haworth is pronounced correctly as 'Ha- worth', and St John as 'Sinj'n', cant fault the narrator wonderful performance emotional where needed,kept me really engaged!
Highly recommend!
1 person found this helpful
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- krissi
- 08-13-20
Utterly boring
I love anything bronte but this has got to be the most ill-conceived book I've tried to read about them.
Tedious, nothing like the description, no atmosphere created by this narrator.
Sorry, going for refund.
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Story
The Art of the Wasted Day is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude. Patricia Hampl visits the homes of historic exemplars of ease who made repose a goal, even an art form. She begins with two celebrated 18th-century Irish ladies who ran off to live a life of "retirement" in rural Wales. Her search then leads to Moravia to consider the monk-geneticist, Gregor Mendel, and finally to Bordeaux for Michel Montaigne who retreated from court life to sit in his chateau tower and write about whatever passed through his mind.
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Perfect Flow of Consciousness Piece
- By Richard on 04-30-18
By: Patricia Hampl
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Ted Hughes
- The Unauthorized Life
- By: Jonathan Bate
- Narrated by: Mike Grady
- Length: 25 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Ted Hughes, poet laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet in history, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron.
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Phenomenal thanks to narrator!
- By equinox14 on 06-26-16
By: Jonathan Bate
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Artful
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Ali Smith
- Length: 4 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2012, Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Those lectures, presented here, took the shape of discursive stories that refused to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form. Thus, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted - literally - by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. A hypnotic dialogue unfolds between storytelling and a meditation on art that encompasses love, grief, memory, and revitalization.
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#Reality/Loss/Mythology
- By Ellen K. on 11-14-18
By: Ali Smith
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Sargent's Women
- Four Lives Behind the Canvas
- By: Donna M. Lucey
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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With unprecedented access to newly discovered sources, Donna M. Lucey illuminates the lives of four extraordinary women painted by the iconic high-society portraitist John Singer Sargent. With uncanny clairvoyance, Sargent's portraits hint at the mysteries, passions, and tragedies that unfolded in his subjects' lives.
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Bust for a big Sargent fan!
- By Jennifer on 11-26-17
By: Donna M. Lucey
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Alice Behind Wonderland
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 2 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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On a summer's day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church College in Oxford, Charles Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding camera, recently purchased in London. Simon Winchester deftly uses the resulting image - as unsettling as it is famous, and the subject of bottomless speculation - as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of English literature.
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Not Long Enough
- By thefrogman on 06-18-12
By: Simon Winchester
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My Life in Middlemarch
- By: Rebecca Mead
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch,regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage, and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not.
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A Reader's Pleasure!
- By Doggy Bird on 02-17-14
By: Rebecca Mead
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The Hare with Amber Eyes
- A Hidden Inheritance
- By: Edmund de Waal
- Narrated by: Michael Maloney
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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The Ephrussis were a grand banking family, as rich and respected as the Rothschilds, who “burned like a comet” in 19th-century Paris and Vienna society. Yet by the end of World War II, almost the only thing remaining of their vast empire was a collection of 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox. The renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal became the fifth generation to inherit this small and exquisite collection of netsuke. Entranced by their beauty and mystery, he determined to trace the story of his family through the story of the collection.
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A vagabond through history, clutching a tiny carvi
- By SB Price on 01-19-12
By: Edmund de Waal
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Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller, and Countrywoman
- By: Judy Taylor
- Narrated by: Patricia Routledge
- Length: 3 hrs and 8 mins
- Abridged
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Starting with the publication of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, in 1902, Beatrix Potter went on to become one of the world’s most successful children’s authors. This biographical audiobook takes the reader through the whole of her life, from her Victorian childhood in London to her final years farming in the Lake District. Regarded as a standard work on Beatrix Potter’s life, this work has been updated regularly to include fresh material that has come to light as interest in Beatrix Potter continues to grow.
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Loved it!
- By Kimberly on 06-14-17
By: Judy Taylor
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House of Dreams
- The Life of L.M. Montgomery
- By: Liz Rosenberg, Julie Morstad - illustrator
- Narrated by: Susan Hanfield
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Once upon a time, there was a girl named Maud who adored stories. When she was fourteen years old, Maud wrote in her journal, "I love books. I hope when I grow up to be able to have lots of them." Not only did Maud grow up to own lots of books, she wrote twenty-four of them herself as L. M. Montgomery, the world-renowned author of Anne of Green Gables. For many years, her lifelong struggles with anxiety and depression, her "year of mad passion" and her difficult married life were buried deep within her unpublished personal journals....
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Home’o’dreams
- By Steve G. on 02-25-20
By: Liz Rosenberg, and others
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The Gift
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write - a book very much like The Gift itself.
One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899.
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A complex and rich Künstlerroman
- By Darwin8u on 11-30-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Possessed
- Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
- By: Elif Batuman
- Narrated by: Elif Batuman
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Possessed we watch Elif Batuman investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has 100 different words for crying; and see an 18th-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their places in The Possessed.
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Dear Russian Literary Diary...
- By Darwin8u on 08-29-17
By: Elif Batuman
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Louisa May Alcott
- The Woman Behind Little Women
- By: Harriet Reisen
- Narrated by: Harriet Reisen
- Length: 12 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Louisa May Alcott portrays a writer as worthy of interest in her own right as her most famous character, Jo March, and addresses all aspects of Alcott's life: the effect of her father's self-indulgent utopian schemes; her family's chronic economic difficulties and frequent uprootings; her experience as a nurse in the Civil War; and the loss of her health and frequent recourse to opiates in search of relief from migraines, insomnia, and symptomatic pain.
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interesting life, strange reader
- By h and l on 01-10-10
By: Harriet Reisen
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American Bloomsbury
- By: Susan Cheever
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Here is a fascinating biography of those who were, in the mid-19th century, at the center of American thought and literature. It was an eclectic cast of characters. At various times in Concord, Massachusetts, three houses were home to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry and John Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathanial Hawthorne. Among their friends and neighbors were Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, and others - men and women are at the heart of American idealism.
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Decent intro to 1840's Concord
- By Paula on 02-20-07
By: Susan Cheever
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Bookworm
- A Memoir of Childhood Reading
- By: Lucy Mangan
- Narrated by: Lucy Mangan
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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When Lucy Mangan was little, stories were everything. They opened up new worlds and cast light on all the complexities she encountered in this one. She was whisked away to Narnia and Kirrin Island and Wonderland. She ventured down rabbit holes and womble burrows into midnight gardens and chocolate factories. She wandered the countryside with Milly-Molly-Mandy and played by the tracks with the Railway Children.
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I love this!
- By M. Ashby on 03-12-20
By: Lucy Mangan