Liber Amoris: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Liber Amoris, credited to William Hazlitt, 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 Liber Amoris by William Hazlitt. Read by Nick Duncan Liber Amoris is unlike anything Hazlitt wrote and probably like nothing you've come across before. On the face of it it tells the story of Hazlitt's infatuation with his landlords daughter. Hazlitt was middle aged and she young and pretty, a bit of a coquette from the sound of it. It turned out badly for Hazlitt and the book tells the story of this doomed love. Critics have always been divided about the merit of the piece. Even those who see its merit often feel more comfortable with his polished literary works, and perhaps rightly so. This is not a work to make you feel comfortable. I'd like to propose though that there is more to this as a work of art. It was the beginning of the era of the auto-biography that was arguably started by Rousseau in his Confessions. Going beyond Rousseau's mild self criticism, Hazlitt gives a ruthless self portrait (as well as an unsparing portrait of the object of his affections) of the weakness and mental turmoil that he experienced during the love affair. In this it is much closer to the theatre of cruelty of Antonin Artaud in which a pure artisitc truth is revealed through 'shattering a false reality that lies like a shroud over our perceptions'. Hazlitt had this in spades. So if you are looking for a polished stroll through the romantic sensibility this is not for you. This is about a close as you'll get to participating in a romantic car crash. A work of great art. Notes: Nick Duncan

Recording facts

• Recording title: Liber Amoris
• Author credits: William Hazlitt
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 5
• Listed recording duration: 3:36:45

Catalogue topics

• poetry
• Hazlitt
• Love

Track guide

1. 01 - Section A — 43:55
2. 02 - Section B — 47:09
3. 03 - Section C — 42:38
4. 04 - Section D — 29:18
5. 05 - Section E — 54:01

Listen to this recording

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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.