The Untempered Wind: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Untempered Wind, credited to Joanna E. Wood, 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 Untempered Wind by Joanna E. Wood. Read in English by Bruce Pirie Upon publication of “The Untempered Wind” in 1894, Joanna Wood quickly rose to international prominence, becoming in the next few years the most highly paid fiction-writer in Canada. In this novel, we find a detailed picture of village life. The narrative weaves through a variety of character types: the refined and the coarse, the humble and the self-righteous, the virtuous and the vicious. All these types are measured according to their treatment of Myron Holder, a young unwed mother — a “fallen woman” in the eyes of this “spiteful, narrow-minded village.” An early reviewer extolled Wood as Canada’s Charlotte Brontë, because of her sympathetic treatment of a disadvantaged woman trying to forge an independent life. An even more apt comparison might be to Thomas Hardy: like Hardy's characters, Myron is buffeted by cruel, relentless Fate — the “untempered wind” of the title. In “Silenced Sextet” (a 1993 study of once-popular Canadian women writers who subsequently dropped out of the public eye), Joanna Wood is seen as an important figure in the development of realism in Canadian literature: “No nineteenth-century writer better presents the sound, smell, and feel of day-to-day village life in this country.” - Summary by Bruce Pirie

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Untempered Wind
• Author credits: Joanna E. Wood
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 24
• Listed recording duration: 11:40:13

Catalogue topics

• Canada
• Ontario
• 19th century
• village life
• unwed mother
• realism
• fate
• small town

Track guide

1. 01 - Chapter 1 — 10:45
2. 02 - Chapter 2 — 19:14
3. 03 - Chapter 3 — 18:58
4. 04 - Chapter 4 — 24:52
5. 05 - Chapter 5 — 40:05
6. 06 - Chapter 6 — 22:55
7. 07 - Chapter 7 — 23:21
8. 08 - Chapter 8 — 37:18
9. 09 - Chapter 9 — 20:04
10. 10 - Chapter 10 — 25:46
11. 11 - Chapter 11 — 39:54
12. 12 - Chapter 12 — 33:20
13. 13 - Chapter 13 — 37:58
14. 14 - Chapter 14 — 46:14
15. 15 - Chapter 15 — 39:37
16. 16 - Chapter 16 — 37:22
17. 17 - Chapter 17 — 36:30
18. 18 - Chapter 18 — 26:56
19. 19 - Chapter 19 — 22:40
20. 20 - Chapter 20 — 33:58
21. 21 - Chapter 21 — 32:41
22. 22 - Chapter 22 — 27:17
23. 23 - Chapter 23 — 29:34
24. 24 - Chapter 24 — 12:54

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.