A Journey Through Marital Tales: 52 Storybooks

Classic Tales of Courtship, Domestic Conflict, Social Convention, and Changing Gender RolesBy George Bernard Shaw, John Kendrick Bangs, George Farquhar, Susanna Centlivre, Henrik Ibsen, Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, Allan Monkhouse, Humphry Mrs. Ward, Charlotte Skinner, P. Jones, Mrs. Gordon Smythies, Arthur Hornblow, George Howells Broadhurst, Florence L. Barclay, A. S. M. Hutchinson, Archibald Marshall, Arthur Stringer, George Sand, Halliwell Sutcliffe, Margaret Widdemer, Mabel Barnes-Grundy, Neith Boyce, Martha Morton, W. Heimburg, Albert Delpit, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, George Moore, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Walter Besant, Alfred Ollivant, Cornelia A. P. Comer, August Strindberg, P. G. Wodehouse, Mae M. Franking, Katherine Anne Porter, HonorÃ© de Balzac, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Morrison, George Gissing, Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Elinor Glyn, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hannah More, Mary Croom Brown, Fowl, Helen Rowland, Burt L. Standish, Annie F. Johnston, Carolyn Wells, James Montgomery Flagg, Sir John Dillon, Edward Ward, Frank Chapman Bliss

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Length339h 20m

About this audiobook

A Journey Through Marital Tales: 52 Storybooks surveys marriage as contract, comedy, ordeal, aspiration, and social institution across an unusually broad transnational archive. Its stories and dramatic selections move from satirical intrigue and drawing-room wit to domestic realism, psychological conflict, sentimental romance, and pointed social critique. Comic reversals, contested inheritances, illicit desires, estranged spouses, and the pressures of respectability recur throughout, while the volume's strongest effect lies in the contrast between theatrical ingenuity and intimate prose observation. By placing canonical and less frequently recalled writers in conversation, the collection situates marital narrative within changing ideas of gender, class, law, and personal freedom. The contributors span major nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary cultures, bringing together dramatists, novelists, popular storytellers, humorists, and realist observers from Britain, France, Scandinavia, and the United States. Their varied careers intersect with realism, naturalism, the comedy of manners, New Woman debate, domestic fiction, and modern psychological fiction. Collectively, these voices reveal how marriage served both as a durable narrative convention and as a site for testing social reform, emotional autonomy, and unequal power. This volume is especially recommended to readers of comparative literature, theatre, gender studies, and the history of the short narrative. It offers a valuable opportunity to trace recurring marital questions through sharply divergent styles and cultural assumptions, fostering productive dialogue among works that entertain, unsettle, and illuminate one another.

Family Mythological World Marriage of Convenience Gods & Mortals Historical Romance Identity Satire Psychological Romantic Comedy Crime