The Blithedale Romance: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Blithedale Romance, credited to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 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 The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Read by Christine Dufour. The Blithedale Romance is the story of four principal characters who work with -- and sometimes against -- each other on Blithedale, a communal farm antecedent to those that sprang up later in the 1960s, and similar to one on which Hawthorne himself lived in 1841. These communes arose out of the pressures on society and the individual brought by the Industrial Revolution. Some were organized around religious philosophies, some were secular. Among the secularists, the Transcendental movement mentioned in the novel espoused the idea that the individual's intuition, rather than religious dogma, was the true path to spiritual enlightenment. Our four characters, like so many who fled to these communes, struggle to free mankind from bondage as they struggle with the unaccustomed day-to-day tasks of farm life. But they are plagued by a mystery that follows them from the world, and ultimately leads to tragedy. (Summary by Christine Dufour) For more free audiobooks, or to become a volunteer reader, please visit librivox.org.

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Blithedale Romance
• Author credits: Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 30
• Listed recording duration: 8:48:27

Catalogue topics

• fiction
• American literature

Opening tracks: first 24 of 30

1. 00 - Preface — 5:41
2. 01 - Old Moodie — 8:43
3. 02 - Blithedale — 11:03
4. 03 - A Knot of Dreamers — 19:06
5. 04 - The Supper-Table — 18:05
6. 05 - Until Bedtime — 15:03
7. 06 - Coverdale's Sick-Chamber — 22:10
8. 07 - The Convalescent — 19:08
9. 08 - A Modern Arcadia — 25:43
10. 09 - Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla — 27:48
11. 10 - A Visitor From Town — 15:43
12. 11 - The Wood-Path — 19:10
13. 12 - Coverdale's Hermitage — 16:13
14. 13 - Zenobia's Legend — 24:33
15. 14 - Eliot's Pulpit — 24:58
16. 15 - A Crisis — 18:29
17. 16 - Leave-Takings — 17:12
18. 17 - The Hotel — 17:03
19. 18 - The Boarding-House — 14:15
20. 19 - Zenobia's Drawing-Room — 17:50
21. 20 - They Vanish — 11:20
22. 21 - An Old Acquaintance — 16:30
23. 22 - Fauntleroy — 26:49
24. 23 - A Village Hall — 22:41

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.