The Doctor's Wife: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Doctor's Wife, credited to Mary Elizabeth Braddon, 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 Doctor's Wife, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Read by Kirsten Wever. This is one of the Victorian “Sensationist” Mary Elizabeth Braddon's many novels (best known among them: “Lady Audley’s Secret”). It is extremely well written, fluid, humorous and, in places, self-mocking: one of the main characters is a Sensation Author. The motifs of the-woman-with-a-secret, adultery, and death are classic “sensationist” material. Yet this is also a self-consciously serious work of literature, taking on various social themes of the day. Specifically, Braddon presents the psychological struggle and cognitive dissonance which are the inevitable plight of the married middle-class woman with a strong sense of self, who is essentially constrained to live the life of her husband. In this, it echoes Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.” The heroine, Isabel Sleaford, was driven early in her childhood to bury herself in, and develop her sense of self through, romantic novels and poetry. She is thus ill-adapted to the conventional, provincial structures and strictures laid upon her when she marries the very good and adoring, but also boring and unimaginative, Dr. George Gilbert. Isabel forms friendships with men (including her husband's best friend) who are more amenable to her romantic inclinations, and inevitably encounters social condemnation as a result. The book shows how life’s tragedies and the world’s cruel judgments shape Isabel, as she grows more mature, somewhat embittered, but also – true to her nature – beautifully resilient. (Summary by Kirsten Wever)

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Doctor's Wife
• Author credits: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 38
• Listed recording duration: 17:59:51

Catalogue topics

• audio book
• fiction
• historical-fiction
• romance

Opening tracks: first 24 of 38

1. 01 - Chapter 1 — 16:50
2. 02 - Chapter 2 — 30:57
3. 03 - Chapter 3 — 45:38
4. 04 - Chapter 4 — 29:26
5. 05 - Chapter 5 — 35:05
6. 06 - Chapter 6 — 34:05
7. 07 - Chapter 7 — 43:58
8. 08 - Chapter 8 — 14:22
9. 09 - Chapter 9 — 20:10
10. 10 - Chapter 10 — 18:56
11. 11 - Chapter 11 — 25:23
12. 12 - Chapter 12 — 46:26
13. 13 - Chapter 13 — 33:57
14. 14 - Chapter 14 — 31:02
15. 15 - Chapter 15 — 13:48
16. 16 - Chapter 16 — 29:38
17. 17 - Chapter 17 — 48:49
18. 18 - Chapter 18 — 33:18
19. 19 - Chapter 19 — 17:35
20. 20 - Chapter 20 — 32:32
21. 21 - Chapter 21 — 26:19
22. 22 - Chapter 22 — 19:41
23. 23 - Chapter 23 — 23:42
24. 24 - Chapter 24 — 23:36

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.