The Chimney Corner: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Chimney Corner, credited to Harriet Beecher Stowe, 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 Chimney Corner by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Read by LibriVox Volunteers Stowe wrote over 30 books. This one is a fascinating collection of her post Civil War musings on a variety of cultural topics, staged mostly as conversations between Christopher Crowfield (Stowe's masculine nome de plume), and his wife, their son Ben, daughter Jenny, their friends, and various neighbors who drop in to chat around the fireside. Lively topics include women's suffrage & their education, entertainment, fashion, the economy during reconstruction, youth entertainment, and how society and its institutions should prepare young women for useful, meaningful lives besides getting married or simply depending on other family members to support them while they do little or nothing, or worse, fall into a street life. She reflects on the economic after-effects of the Civil War, and the struggle to create a more civilized nation. ( ~ Michele Fry)

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Chimney Corner
• Author credits: Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 15
• Listed recording duration: 7:51:55

Catalogue topics

• housekeeping
• education
• women's suffrage
• reconstruction
• household management
• domestic life
• employment

Track guide

1. 01 - Ch.1 What will you do with her? or The Woman Question — 37:55
2. 02 - Ch.2.1 Woman's Sphere — 24:59
3. 03 - Ch. 2.2 Woman's Sphere — 26:31
4. 04 - Ch. 3.1 A Family-Talk on Reconstruction — 25:02
5. 05 - Ch 3.2 A family-Talk on Reconstruction — 30:54
6. 06 - Ch.4 Is Woman a Worker? — 34:25
7. 07 - Ch.5 The Transition — 26:53
8. 08 - Ch. 6 Boily Religion: A Sermon on Good Health — 34:21
9. 09 - Ch. 7 How Shall we Entertain our Company? — 31:01
10. 10 - Ch.8 How Shall we be Amused? — 27:40
11. 11 - Ch.9 Dress, or who makes the Fashions — 46:47
12. 12 - Ch.10 What are the sources of Beauty in Dress — 39:36
13. 13 - Ch.11 The Cathedral — 32:29
14. 14 - Ch.12 The New Year — 32:09
15. 15 - Ch.13 The Noble Army of Martyrs — 21:13

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.