Wives and Daughters: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Wives and Daughters, credited to Elizabeth Gaskell, 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 Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell. If you like Jane Austen, you will probably like this book! Mrs. Gaskell, as she was often referred to, is considered one of the greatest British novelists of the Victorian era. She was one of the earliest novelists ever to use dialect in her works, finding often that no word but the vernacular would suffice to convey the meaning she wanted to achieve. She was the author of The Life of Charlotte Brontë, a much-acclaimed and sometimes-reviled biography of her friend and peer. Wives and Daughters revolves around Molly Gibson, only daughter of a widowed doctor living in a provincial English town in the 1830s. The novel was first published in the Cornhill Magazine as a serial from August 1864 to January 1866. When Mrs Gaskell died suddenly in 1865, it was not quite complete, and the last section was written by Frederick Greenwood. (Summary from Wikipedia)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Wives and Daughters
• Author credits: Elizabeth Gaskell
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 61
• Listed recording duration: 27:15:55

Catalogue topics

• fiction
• gaskell

Opening tracks: first 24 of 61

1. 01 The Dawn of a Gala Day — 22:03
2. 02 A Novice Amongst The Great Folk — 34:06
3. 03 Molly Gibson's Childhood — 19:56
4. 04 Mr. Gibson's Neighbors — 31:46
5. 05 Calf Love — 27:05
6. 06 A Visit to the Hamleys — 39:01
7. 07 Foreshadows of Love's Perils — 20:37
8. 08 Drifting into Danger — 35:46
9. 09 The Widower and the Widow — 26:28
10. 10 A Crisis — 55:50
11. 11 Making Friendship — 36:08
12. 12 Preparing for the Wedding — 19:33
13. 13 Molly Gibson's New Friends — 28:01
14. 14 Molly Finds Herself Patronized — 33:50
15. 15 The New Mamma — 20:38
16. 16 The Bride at Home — 24:49
17. 17 Trouble at Hamley Hall — 24:38
18. 18 Mr. Osborne's Secret — 30:36
19. 19 Cynthia's Arrival — 25:21
20. 20 Mrs Gibson's Visitors — 19:23
21. 21 The Half-Sisters — 30:42
22. 22 The Old Squire's Troubles — 31:50
23. 23 Osborne Hamley Reviews His Position — 23:51
24. 24 Mrs. Gibson's Little Dinner — 16:32

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.