Women's voices in Penguin Classics
Virginia Woolf (Author)
,
Ruth Wilson (Read by)
,
Hermione Lee (Introducer)
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by Ruth Wilson, star of Luther, Mrs Wilson and His Dark Materials. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Hermione Lee.
To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever; but as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged. The novel's use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives it an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values.
(P) Penguin Audio 2020
Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Author)
,
Avita Jay (Read by)
,
Russell Crofts (Introducer)
,
Jenny Taylor (Introducer)
Brought to you by Penguin
This Penguin Classic is performed by Avita Jay, who has appeared on stage in Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World, Peer Gynt, and Bring on the Bollywood. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Jenny Bourne Taylor and Russell Crofts.
Weathering critical scorn, Lady Audley's Secret quickly established Mary Elizabeth Braddon as the leading light of Victorian 'sensation' fiction, sharing the honour only with Wilkie Collins. Addictive, cunningly plotted and certainly sensational, Lady Audley's Secret draws on contemporary theories of insanity to probe mid-Victorian anxieties about the rapid rise of consumer culture. What is the mystery surrounding the charming heroine? Lady Audley's secret is investigated by Robert Audley, aristocrat turned detective, in a novel that has lost none of its power to disturb and entertain.
(P) Penguin Audio 2020
Jane Austen (Author)
,
Indira Varma (Read by)
,
Kristin Atherton (Read by)
,
Tony Tanner (Introducer)
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by Indira Varma, who has starred in Luther and Game of Thrones. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Vivien Jones.
When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial middle-class life.
(P) Penguin Audio 2020
Aphra Behn (Author)
,
Isabel Adomakoh-Young (Read by)
,
Kristin Atherton (Read by)
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This Penguin Classic is performed by Isabel Adomakoh Young. Isabel's credits include The Provoked Wife with the RSC and playing Lady Macbeth in the West End with the National Youth Theatre Rep Company. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Janet Todd.
Restoration-era poet, playwright and novelist Aphra Behn was the first truly professional woman writer in English, and Oroonoko is her sophisticated and insightful condemnation of slavery. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction by Janet Todd.
When Prince Oroonoko's passion for the virtuous Imoinda arouses the jealousy of his grandfather, the lovers are cast into slavery and transported from Africa to the colony of Surinam. Oroonoko's noble bearing soon wins the respect of his English captors, but his struggle for freedom brings about his destruction. Inspired by Aphra Behn's visit to Surinam, Oroonoko reflects the author's romantic view of native peoples as noble savages in 'the first state of innocence, before man knew how to sin'. The novel also reveals Behn's ambiguous attitude to African slavery - while she favoured it as a means to strengthen England's rule, her powerful and moving work conveys its injustice and brutality.
This new edition of Oroonoko is based on the first printed version of 1688, and includes a chronology, further reading and notes. In her introduction, Janet Todd examines Aphra Behn's views of slavery, colonization and politics, and her position as a professional woman writer in the Restoration.
Little is known of Aphra Behn's (1640-1689) early life. She was probably born in Kent, and in the early 1660s claims to have visited the British colony of Surinam. She turned to literature for a living, producing numerous short stories, 19 stage plays and political propaganda for the Tories.
(P) Penguin Audio 2020
Emily Brontë (Author)
,
Aimee Lou Wood (Read by)
,
Kristin Atherton (Read by)
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This Penguin Classic is performed by Aimee Lou Wood, star of Netflix's Sex Education. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Pauline Nestor.
Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before: of the intense passion between the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and her betrayal of him. As Heathcliff's bitterness and vengeance is visited upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past.
(P) Penguin Audio 2020
Artwork © 2025 WBEI
George Eliot (Author)
,
Anne-Marie Duff (Read by)
,
A. S. Byatt (Introducer)
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by Anne-Marie Duff, star of the BBC's The Salisbury Poisonings and Shameless. This definitive recording features an introduction by A.S Byatt, writer, critic and author of Possession.
Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents, but her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her family. As she reaches adulthood, the clash between their expectations and her desires is painfully played out as she finds herself torn between her relationships with three very different men: her proud and stubborn brother, a close friend who is also the son of her family's worst enemy, and a charismatic but dangerous suitor. With its poignant portrayal of sibling relationships, The Mill on the Floss is considered George Eliot's most autobiographical novel; it is also one of her most powerful and moving.
(P) Penguin Audio 2020
Charlotte Lennox (Author)
,
Donna Banya (Read by)
,
Kristin Atherton (Read by)
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This Penguin Classic is performed by Donna Banya, who has appeared on stage in Fairview at the Young Vic and in Macbeth and Romeo & Juliet with the RSC. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Amanda Gilroy.
Beautiful and independent, Arabella has been brought up in rural seclusion by her widowed father. Devoted to reading French romances, the sheltered young woman imagines all sorts of misadventures that can befall a heroine such as herself. As she makes forays into fashionable society in Bath and London, many scrapes and mortifications ensue - all men seem like predators wishing to ravish her, she mistakes a cross-dressing prostitute for a distressed gentlewoman, and she risks her life by throwing herself into the Thames to avoid a potential seducer. Can Arabella be cured of her romantic delusions? An immediate success when it first appeared in 1752, The Female Quixote is a wonderfully high-spirited parody of the style of Cervantes, and a telling and comic depiction of eighteenth-century English society.
(P) Penguin Audio 2020
Jane Austen (Author)
,
Fiona Stafford (Introducer)
,
Tanya Reynolds (Read by)
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by Tanya Reynolds, star of Sex Education. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Fiona Stafford.
With its imperfect but charming heroine and its witty and subtle exploration of relationships, Emma is often seen as Jane Austen's most flawless work. Beautiful, clever, rich-and single-Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protégée Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected.
Mary Wollstonecraft (Author)
,
Mary Shelley (Author)
,
Rosalind Eleazar (Read by)
,
Kristin Atherton (Read by)
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by Rosalind Eleazar, star of The Personal History of David Copperfield. This definitive edition includes an introduction by Janet Todd.
These three works of fiction - two by Mary Wollstonecraft, the radical author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and one by her daughter Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein - are powerfully emotive stories that combine passion with forceful feminist argument. In Mary Wollstonecraft's Mary, the heroine flees her young husband in order to nurse her dearest friend, Ann, and finds genuine love, while Maria tells of a desperate young woman who seeks consolation in the arms of another man after the loss of her child. And Mary Shelley's Matilda - suppressed for over a century - tells the story of a woman alienated from society by the incestuous passion of her father. Humane, compassionate and highly controversial, these stories demonstrate the strongly original genius of their authors.
(P) Penguin Audio 2020
Elizabeth Gaskell (Author)
,
Laura Aikman (Read by)
,
Pam Morris (Introducer)
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by Laura Aikman. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Pam Norris.
Set in English society before the 1832 Reform Bill, Wives and Daughters centres on the story of youthful Molly Gibson, brought up from childhood by her father. When he remarries a new stepsister, Cynthia, enters Molly's quiet life. Loveable but worldly and troubling, Cynthia's arrival alters Molly's daily life. The narrative traces the development of the two girls into womanhood within the gossiping and watchful society of Hollingford.
Wives and Daughters is far more than a nostalgic evocation of village life; it offers an ironic critique of mid-Victorian society
(P) Penguin Audio 2020
Virginia Woolf (Author)
,
Masali Baduza (Read by)
,
Kristin Atherton (Read by)
,
Jane Wheare (Introducer)
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by Masali Baduza, star of the BBC adaptation of Malorie Blackman's Noughts + Crosses. This definitive recording features an introduction by Jane Wheare.
A party of English people are aboard the Euphrosyne, bound for South America. Among them is Rachel Vinrace, a young girl, innocent and wholly ignorant of the world of politics and society, books, sex, love and marriage. She is a free spirit half-caught, momentarily and passionately, by Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer who she meets in Santa Marina. But their engagement is to end abruptly, and tragically. Virginia Woolf's first novel, published in 1915, is a haunting exploration of a young woman's mind, signalling the beginning of her fascination with capturing the mysteries and complexities of the inner life.
© Virginia Woolf 1992 (P) Penguin Audio 2020
Mary Seacole (Author)
,
Yasmin Mwanza (Read by)
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by Yasmin Mwanza. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Sarah Salih.
Written in 1857, this is the autobiography of a Jamaican woman whose fame rivalled Florence Nightingale's during the Crimean War. Seacole's offer to volunteer as a nurse in the war met with racism and refusal. Undaunted, Seacole set out independently to the Crimea where she acted as doctor and 'mother' to wounded soldiers while running her business, the 'British Hotel'. A witness to key battles, she gives vivid accounts of how she coped with disease, bombardment and other hardships at the Crimean battlefront.
"In her introduction to the very welcome Penguin edition, Sara Salih expertly analyses the rhetorical complexities of Seacole's book to explore the richness of her story. Traveller, entrepreneur, healer and woman of colour, Mary Seacole is a singular and fascinating figure, overstepping all conventional boundaries." Jan Marsh, Independent
"It's hard to believe that this amazing adventure story is the true-life experience of a Jamaican woman - it would make a great film." Andrea Levy, Sunday Times
(P) Penguin Audio 2020
