Gentle readers,
If you like me, there are only so many hours a day you can read silently to yourself, and only so much binge watching of a favorite TV series, and then only so many blogs and letter-postings you can write, and you don’t cook, sew, garden, are not into deep cleaning, and fall asleep listening to music late at night, I recommend two of my favorite books read aloud exquisitely well and a femino-centric detective series.
Jennifer Ehle, who we all remember as a brunette Elizabeth Bennett to Colin Firth’s Darcy, & is naturally a blonde, shows that she understands Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The reading is for free on YouTube. I’d have preferred a more satiric or overtly ironic voice (Juliet Stevenson’s way of reading aloud Austen’s books), yet this quietly calm gently nuanced kind of voice leaves room for build-ups of emotional thought, dramatic scenes, different interpretations. It is dramatic reading, not acting.
Not for free, but offering a way to conquer the length of The Mysteries of Udolpho a chapter at a time, Karen Class’s voice is in the same quietly neutral register. The text is also unabridged. In some moods I prefer Emily in Udolpho, with its alluring landscapes, to Austen’s Emma, heroine and book. I believe Austen learned her ability to use third person narrative subjectively from Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest. This elegant subjective style intermixed with ironic scenes against a backdrop of landscape can be found in Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde, but Smith is nowhere as smooth and able to bring us inward in the way Radcliffe magically (as was once said) brings us in. All three of Radcliffe’s famous novels are pervasive influential in Northanger Abbey. Again the reading is unaggressive, leaving room this time for the reader to dwell on the text’s beauty and increasingly complex thought.
It’s all there too. Instead of many images of an actress, you have many podcast-like links.
And in one of my daughter, Laura Moody’s more radiant reviews as anibundel, she recommends the Miss Fisher mystery series now out on Acorn, all of them
Fans love “Miss Fisher” because it is a rarity in the genre: Running for three seasons from 2012 to 2015, it was a series set in 1928, starring an unapologetically sexy and self-assured female crime-solver. Most of these mystery series from overseas are male-focused, whether it be the older period pieces like “Sherlock Holmes” and “Hercules Poirot” or the newer “Grantchester” and “Endeavour” series. Mystery shows starring women in the lead investigator role usually work to keep them nonthreatening. “Miss Marple” and “Vera” star older women, Helen Mirren in “Prime Detective” played a hardened and embittered detective, as so does Nicola Walker in the current series, “Unforgotten.”
Phryne Fisher (Essie Davis) says nuts to that. From her arrival in the show’s series premiere she is joyous, a woman with a lust for life and a budget to live it. Her house is fabulous, her wardrobe extensive, and her car would make James Bond jealous. Her appetites extend to men as well, a virtual parade of them roll through her bed before she waves them off with a “I’m not the marrying kind.”
Moreover, Miss Fisher’s mysteries aren’t just solved by a feminist powerhouse, many times the mystery is itself female-centric …
The pandemic has its compensations. Three sister-authors, quietly wonderful readers and actresses.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
[…] classics, operas, movies, some for free (as an advertisement for themselves). Actors and actresses reading books aloud. Other ordinary people trying to reach us and cheer us and themselves up. I do get more letters […]