Stevenson’s aural depiction of Edward Casaubon, whose pedantry our young heroine Dorothea disastrously mistakes for wisdom, is simultaneously severe and generous. More than distinguishing each character by his her or her own cadence and accent, Stevenson brings a well of compassion and humor seemingly as deep as Eliot’s own to Middlemarch, a sprawling provincial community taking first steps toward modernization in the 1830s. It turns out Stevenson is a ubiquitous presence in the Naxos catalogue she’s recorded all of Jane Austen for them as well a significant portion of Virginia Woolf, and she won an “Audie” award, given out by the Audio Publishers Association, for her reading of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook in the category of sole female narration. I learned this when I encountered Juliet Stevenson’s astounding delivery of George Eliot’s Middlemarch on Naxos AudioBooks.ĭuring the course of reading Middlemarch Stevenson performs 25 major and dozens of minor characters, encompassing 35 hours of performance.

The experience of listening to these artists is akin to seeing an expert production of a play, where so much interpretive work is done for you, without taking anything from you. What I hadn’t anticipated, even after I found a worthwhile voice (female) to tell me the tale of Isabel Archer, was that on this earth walk certain readers who illuminate a text more than any first-time reader possibly could. I knew I had to find, not just a voice, but a sensibility with whom I wanted to travel a significant journey. This John Wood thing was not going to work. We can brook no artificiality, paradoxically, if our fictions are to become real for us. I waded in with an unabridged Portrait of a Lady read by John Wood, but every time the actor tried on the voice of a woman, I winced at his effort. And, in fact, thanks to audiobooks I now look forward to many of the tasks I used to put off (or not do at all). I began to believe some of my stupid time - doing dishes, at the gym - might be more fun if I spent it with Henry James. But this woman's reading of Tolstoy reminded me that control isn’t always the best choice.

Like most voracious child-readers, once I was able to take the book into my own hands, I never wanted to relinquish it to anyone else’s interpretation. The musicality of her voice awoke in me a sense-memory of being read to in bed as a child. In any case, a woman in my book group inadvertently swayed me when she read aloud the portion of Anna Karenina that was under discussion. It’s probably obvious I have no idea how the body works.

FOR A LONG TIME I refused the temptation of the audiobook, believing that any sentence by Austen, Proust, or Flaubert must be processed through the eyes if it was to travel the right path across the frontal lobe and down into the deepest part of the viscera.

Middle march book