Lady Barbarina: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Lady Barbarina, credited to Henry James, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Lady Barbarina by Henry James. Read in English by Nicholas Clifford Rich and beautiful American girls heading to England to find themselves noble titles through marriage, and using their New World wealth to prop up the waning strength of the aristocracy, was almost a staple of late Victorian literature. "The Buccaneers," Edith Wharton called them, and their day is not over yet (think of Downton Abbey's Earl of Grantham, and his American heiress countess). In Lady Barbarina, however, Henry James explores the obverse of this old tale: what if the wealth is in the hands of an American man, in love with the beautiful daughter of an old and titled (but no longer so very rich) family? Legal marital settlements, common in England, less so in America, can be a problem. Think of them as the Victorian equivalent of modern pre-nuptial contracts, introducing a note, not of suspicion perhaps, but of cautious prudence in what otherwise might be seen as a match of pure love. For all their similarities, Britain and the United States remain divided by three thousand miles of open water. - Summary by Nicholas Clifford

Recording facts

• Recording title: Lady Barbarina
• Author credits: Henry James
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 6
• Listed recording duration: 3:53:42

Catalogue topics

• transatlantic marriage

Track guide

1. 01 - Chapter I — 43:11
2. 02 - Chapter II — 34:34
3. 03 - Chapter III — 31:11
4. 04 - Chapter IV — 38:28
5. 05 - Chapter V — 52:05
6. 06 - Chapter VI — 34:13

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.