Elizabeth Klett
Carmilla
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Carmilla is a Gothic novella by Joseph Sheridan le Fanu. First published in 1872, it tells the story of a young woman's susceptibility to th…
Howards End
Read by Elizabeth Klett
E. M. Forster
The book is about three families in England at the beginning of the twentieth century. The three families represent different gradations of …
Lady Audley's Secret
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Mary Elizabeth Braddon's first novel, Lady Audley's Secret, was one of the most popular English novels of its day. Published serially in 186…
The House of Mirth
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth (1905), by Edith Wharton, is a novel about New York socialite Lily Bart attempting to secure a husband and a place in ric…
In Memoriam A.H.H.
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
In Memoriam is Tennyson's elegiac tribute to his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died in 1833 at the age of 22. Tennyson wrote this long poe…
Astrophil and Stella
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Sir Philip Sidney
Astrophil and Stella is a sonnet sequence written by Philip Sidney, an Elizabethan poet and courtier. It details the frustrated love of Astr…
The Glimpses of the Moon
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Edith Wharton
"The Glimpses of the Moon" (1922) is about Nick and Susy Lansing, both of whom live a decadent life in Europe by sponging off weal…
Persuasion (version 2)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Jane Austen
Eight years ago, Anne Elliot fell in love with a poor but ambitious young naval officer, Frederick Wentworth. The Elliots were dissatisfied …
The Dead (version 2)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
James Joyce
This novella is the final story in Joyce's collection Dubliners. It describes a Christmas party given by Kate and Julia Morkan, two elderly …
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Harriet Jacobs
Harriet Jacobs' autobiography, written under the pseudonym Linda Brent, details her experiences as a slave in North Carolina, her escape to …
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Lady Mary Wroth
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is the first sonnet sequence written by an Englishwoman. Published in 1621, the poems invert the usual format of s…
Ethan Frome
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton's 1911 novel Ethan Frome tells the story of a tragic love triangle. Set in the highly symbolic wintry landscape of Starkfield,…
Northanger Abbey (version 2)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey follows Catherine Morland and family friends Mr. and Mrs. Allen as they visit Bath, England. Seventeen year-old Catherine s…
Shakespeare's Sonnets (version 4)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's sequence of 154 sonnets deals with such themes as love, time, death, immortality, lust, and sex. The poems follow but also dep…
Jane Eyre (version 2)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Bronte's classic novel Jane Eyre is narrated by the title character, an orphan who survives neglect and abuse to become a governes…
Sense and Sensibility (version 3)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen's first published novel, focuses on the lives and loves of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. The…
The Return of the Soldier
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Rebecca West
In 1916 on an isolated country estate just outside London, Captain Chris Baldry, a shell-shocked captain suffering from amnesia, makes a bit…
Emma (version 3)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Jane Austen
Jane Austen famously described Emma Woodhouse, the title character of her 1815 novel, as "a heroine whom no-one but myself will much li…
Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn was the first woman writer in England to make a living by her pen, and her novel Oroonoko was the first work published in English…
Olalla
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Robert Louis Stevenson
"Olalla" was a "shilling shocker" written for the Christmas season in 1885, just before the publication of Stevenson's D…
Poems by the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, The Matchless Orin…
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Katherine Philips
The poet Katherine Philips was called "The Matchless Orinda" in her day and was well known for her works, both personal and politi…
Ophelia, the Rose of Elsinore
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Mary Cowden Clarke
This story is from Mary Cowden Clarke's multi-volume work The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, in which she imagined the early lives of c…
The Awakening (version 2)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin's 1899 novella The Awakening is about the personal, sexual, and artistic awakening of a young wife and mother, Edna Pontellier. …
The Farmer's Bride
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Charlotte Mew
The Farmer's Bride is a collection of 28 poems by British modernist writer Charlotte Mew. The original edition was published in 1916; this e…
Pride and Prejudice (version 4)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen's classic comic romance, in which the five Bennett sisters try to find that most elusive creature: a sing…
Poems of West and East
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Vita Sackville-West
Victoria Mary Sackville-West, The Hon Lady Nicolson, best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and poet. Her long narrative p…
The Story of Avis
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's 1877 novel is set in a New England college town, and focuses on Avis Dobell, a professor's daughter. Avis is a ta…
Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Aemilia Lanyer
Aemilia Lanyer's 1611 poem is far more than a retelling of The Passion. It comprises a spirited defense of Eve (and, by extension, all wome…
Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Edith Wharton
American novelist Edith Wharton was living in Paris when World War I broke out in 1914. She obtained permission to visit sites behind the li…
What Maisie Knew
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Henry James
When Beale and Ida Farange are divorced, the court decrees that their only child, the very young Maisie, will shuttle back and forth between…
The Age of Innocence (version 2)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with this 1920 novel about Old New York society. Newland Archer …
Life in the Iron Mills
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Rebecca Harding Davis
This 1861 novella was the first published work by Rebecca Harding Davis: writer, social reformer, and pioneer of literary realism. It tell…
Passing
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Nella Larsen
Nella Larsen, a novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote two brilliant novels that interrogated issues of gender and race. In Passing, her…
The Touchstone
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Edith Wharton
Stephen Glennard's career is falling apart and he desperately needs money so that he may marry his beautiful fiancee. He happens upon an adv…
The House of the Vampire
Read by Elizabeth Klett
George Sylvester Viereck
The House of the Vampire is a 1907 novella that is a very unusual vampire story. A young writer comes under the powerful influence of a myst…
The Room in the Dragon Volant
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
J. Sheridan LeFanu's Gothic mystery novel is narrated by Richard Beckett, a young Englishman abroad in Napoleonic-era France. He falls insta…
Quicksand
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Nella Larsen
Quicksand is a 1928 novel by Nella Larsen, a writer of the Harlem Renaissance. It focuses on Helga Crane, a mixed-race woman who is a school…
The Children of Odin
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Pádraic Colum
Master storyteller Padraic Colum's rich, musical voice captures all the magic and majesty of the Norse sagas in his retellings of the advent…
The Greater Inclination
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Edith Wharton
This is Edith Wharton's earliest published collection of short stories (1899). Like much of her later work, they touch on themes of marriag…
Crucial Instances
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Edith Wharton
This is Edith Wharton's second published collection of short stories (1901). One of these seven stories, "Copy: A Dialogue," is w…
A Room with a View (version 2)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
E. M. Forster
The 1908 novel A Room With a View is the story of Lucy Honeychurch, a young English girl traveling to Italy for the first time. While stayi…
The Waste Land (version 3)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land is T. S. Eliot's Modernist masterpiece, first published in 1920. Rich in allusions to Shakespeare, Dante, Baudelaire, the Bib…
Summer (version 2)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Edith Wharton
Wharton's 1917 novella Summer, like her more famous work Ethan Frome, is set in a very small rural New England town. Charity Royall longs t…
Behind a Mask, or a Woman's Power
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Louisa May Alcott
Fans of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women will remember that her heroine Jo wrote racy novels before turning her hand to more "serious&q…
Madame de Treymes
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton's 1907 novella explores the milieu of Americans living abroad in Paris. New Yorker John Durham travels to Paris to woo an old…
Cousin Phillis
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Cousin Phillis (1864) is a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell about Paul Manning, a youth of seventeen who moves to the country and befriends his mo…
The Semi-Detached House
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Emily Eden
If you're a Jane Austen fan, you'll enjoy Emily Eden's comic novels of manners, The Semi-Detached House (1859) and The Semi-Attached Couple …
News From Nowhere
Read by Elizabeth Klett
William Morris
News from Nowhere (1890) is a classic work combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction written by the artist, designer and socialis…
The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Pádraic Colum
Also known as "The Children's Homer," this is Irish writer Padraic Colum's retelling of the events of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey fo…
The Machine Stops (version 3)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
E. M. Forster
"The Machine Stops" is a science fiction short story by E. M. Forster. After initial publication in The Oxford and Cambridge Revie…
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Phillis Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley was the first African-American to publish a book of poetry in 1773. Born in West Africa, she was sold into slavery at age s…
Idylls of the King
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Idylls of the King, published between 1856 and 1885, is a cycle of twelve narrative poems by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson which re…
The Odd Women
Read by Elizabeth Klett
George Gissing
George Gissing's 1893 novel takes on the 19th century "Woman Question" by looking at themes of feminism, marriage, and love. The …
The Princess
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Princess is a serio-comic blank verse narrative poem, written by Alfred Tennyson, published in 1847. The poem tells the story of an hero…
The Fifth Queen
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Ford Madox Ford
The Fifth Queen trilogy is a series of connected historical novels by English novelist Ford Madox Ford. It consists of three novels, The Fif…
Wives and Daughters (version 2)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Elizabeth Gaskell's last novel was serialized in Cornhill Magazine from 1864 to 1866, and completed by her editor posthumously. It looks at …
The Island
Read by Elizabeth Klett
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Written late in his career, Byron's narrative poem The Island tells the famous story of the mutiny on board the Bounty, and follows the muti…
The Semi-Attached Couple
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Emily Eden
Young and beautiful Helen Eskdale and fabulously wealthy Lord Teviot seem to be the perfect match. But when they marry, they find that misun…
The Marne: a tale of the war
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Edith Wharton
American writer Edith Wharton is known for her novels of manners set in old New York; yet much of her adult life was spent in France. She li…
Goblin Market and Other Poems
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Christina Rossetti
Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) is British writer Christina Rossetti's first book of poetry. The title poem is her most famous work: a …
The Turn of the Screw (version 2)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Henry James
Henry James' classic ghost story comprises the written testimony of a young governess, charged with looking after two small children at an i…
The Letters of Jane Austen
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Jane Austen
This recording includes a selection of Jane Austen's letters, edited by Susan Coolidge and chosen from the collection of Austen's great-neph…
Moving the Mountain
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Moving the Mountain is a feminist utopian novel written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It was published serially in Perkins Gilman's periodica…
Pauline's Passion and Punishment
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Louisa May Alcott
Before she wrote Little Women and Little Men, Louisa, writing under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, had this `blood and thunder' thriller (as sh…
Sanctuary (version 2)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton's early novella focuses on Kate Orme, who begins the story happily in love with her fiance, only to discover that he hides a t…
The Custom of the Country (version 2)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton's 1913 novel is a devastating critique of American upward mobility, told through the journey of Undine Spragg from fictional M…
The Portrait of a Lady (version 2)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan's Magazine in 1880–81 an…
Maude
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Christina Rossetti
Maude is a novella by Christina Rossetti, written in 1850 but published posthumously in 1897. Considered by scholars to be semi-autobiograph…
A Little Princess (Version 3)
Read by Elizabeth Klett
Frances Hodgson Burnett
A Little Princess is a classic of children's literature by the author of The Secret Garden. Seven-year-old Sara Crewe comes to London to att…