Mary Barton (1848) - Elizabeth Gaskell Audiobook

Written by Elizabeth Gaskell
Read by Juliet Stevenson
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: AudioGO
Release date: January 4, 2011
Duration: 16:19:59

The plot to this book is hard to summarize. You may want to visit the Wilipedia detailed plot. Reader Juliet Stevenson is excellent.

Mary Barton is young, kind, and beautiful—perhaps dangerously so, the plot turns on Mary’s romantic choice between Henry Carson, the son of a rich industrialist, and her working class lover Jem Wilson, and the rivalries between them. The class-divide and the widening gap between rich and poor are central themes in a novel John Barton, her hearty and intelligent but grievously uneducated father, pours fierce love and courage into his family and work. The novel originally was named for him.

When Mary’s beautiful Aunt Esther disappears, She is feared dead but is discovered some time later in a brothel. John blames the gentry that he despises.

When the union men decide upon murder after a protest on work conditions is ignored, John Barton is the chosen assassin of Henry Carson. Suspicion falls, however, on Jem, and Mary is torn between her lover and her father.

This is Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel, a widely acclaimed work based on the actual murder, in 1831, of a progressive mill owner. It follows Mary Barton, daughter of a man implicated in the murder, through her adolescence, when she suffers the advances of the mill owner, and later through love and marriage. Set in Manchester, between 1837-42, it paints a powerful and moving picture of working-class life in Victorian England.

A review - Mary Barton is a wonderful failure of a novel, in all of the classic Victorian ways–the love plot is overwrought, the ending is melodramatic, the moralizing is far too heavy, and the epigraphs are obnoxious. But, somehow, in the middle of all those problems, Elizabeth Gaskell manages to capture perfectly something important. Mary Barton is a “Condition of England” novel, a meditation on the plight of Manchester cotton weavers in the depression of the early 1840’s.

And another – I have never understood why Elizabeth Gaskell is not better known. She was a contemporary of Dickens and a much better writer. Both HARD TIMES by Dickens and MARY BARTON by Gaskell deal with the terrible plight of the working poor during the 1840s and 1850s. …… There is a murder, which leads to a thrilling trial. The suspense was skillfully done, leaving me unwilling to put the book down. This novel should lead to an interest in the social and economic realities of England in the mid-1800s….