Books on Tape Techie Time: iTunesU Podcasts

Life can be so sweet when you least expect it. It's not as if I was having a boring Friday night but certainly it was well behaved. While we here at Chez Old Grey Pony were relaxing on the sofa, eating spaghetti, listening to music and gleefully playing with our facebook pages, we couldn't help but wistfully think of our more cashed up acquaintances drinking wine and eating tapas on a restaurant patio somewhere late into the summer evening. But, ours is the fate of all who must pay off student loans and I cheerfully sat down to stroll through my iTunes podcast menu while the blueberry muffins we were baking were in the oven.

Little did I expect to come across The Greatest Podcast of All Time.

iTunesU features a brand new selection of free podcasts created and published by universities for their students and the Lit2Go (love the name) cast created by the University of South Florida is phenomenal and includes, among many others, a fantastic reading of Sense and Sensibility in the Group 9 collection and Northanger Abbey in the Group 12 collection. I don't know who the narrator is but his voice and his style of reading are excellent and it's very refreshing to listen to an Austen novel read by a male narrator for a change, and who is much more talented at reading than some of the actors narrating purchasable titles.

Lit2Go is very exciting and features many classics, too many to mention here but a quick look reveals several Georgian and Austen related works, including:

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Castles of Athlin and Dublayne by Ann Radcliffe

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley

The Purple Jar by Maria Edgeworth

There are so many more and a quick special mention to the Brontë sisters, Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Lewis Carroll and Virginia Woolf, as well as poetry and traditional readings and also another collection En Espaňol. Nice one, University of South Florida. If you do not have iTunes already, you may download it free of charge on the Apple website.

I'm going to have a good old browse through the rest of iTunesU and a blueberry muffin.

Georgian Item of the Week

The Abolition: Olaudah Equiano

Portrait of Olaudah Equiano
Circa 1780
Previously attributed to Joshua Reynolds
Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter

Although forms of bondage had existed in West and Central Africa (and indeed in Europe) before the trans-Atlantic slave trade, human beings were rarely the main commodity at the African marketplace. In the modern world however, the enslaved African was inspected, assessed, auctioned, bought, sold and bartered by Europeans and treated in any manner his owner saw fit.

In 1788 an autobiographical work, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, was published in England, and which set the precedent for anti-slavery literature written by former slaves themselves, which would have a profound impact on the abolition movements in the eighteenth century. Equiano was born in what is modern day Nigeria and kidnapped by slave traders at the age of 11. He was owned by several masters, educated, adopted into Methodism and as he was allowed by his last owner to conduct business for himself, he eventually bought his freedom.

Among the tradition of slave narratives, Equiano's is considered a remarkable achievement since the autobiographical style was not a well-developed genre in the eighteenth century. His narrative has vivid details and is written in the picaresque style. Equiano provides a detailed account of his kidnapping, the unfathomable crossing of the Atlantic in the belly of a slave ship and the brutality, the bondage and the life he endured as a slave.

Georgian Item of the Week

Between the years 1729 and 1737 Henry Fielding wrote 25 plays, including his most well known, Tom Thumb but he acclaimed critical notice with his novels. The best known are The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), a picaresque novel in which the tangled comedies of coincidence are offset by the neat, architectonic structure of the story, and The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742), a parody of Richardson's Pamela (1740). In 1734, he married Charlotte Cradock, who became his model for Sophia Western in Tom Jones and for the heroine of Amelia, the author's last novel.

In 1747, several years after Charlotte Fielding’s death, he caused some scandal by marrying his wife's maid and friend Mary Daniel - he was condemned by every snob in England. She was about to bear his child, and Fielding would not abandon her to disgrace.

Fielding's writings became more socially orientated – among other things, he opposed public hangings. After having studied the law throughout his life, he was appointed to the bar in 1740 and he was made justice of the peace for the City of Westminster in 1748 and for the county of Middlesex in 1749. He fought constantly against corruption and with his brother he set up the Bow Street Runners, a detective force that later turned into Scotland Yard. Fielding was a pioneer of the novel as an art form and Tom Jones has been the most admired of them all by many writers who followed him, including Jane Austen

Bits and Bobs From the Beeb

I love searching through the BBC online archives on a quite afternoon, which today has turned up an audio tour of Austen's house in Hampshire, including readings from her letters, and a few Radio 4 interviews with interesting actors who have worked in Austen adaptations.

For eight years, from 1809 until her death in 1817, Austen lived with her mother, her sister Cassandra and their friend Martha Lloyd, in the village of Chawton in Hampshire. The cottage is open to the public as a kind of museum and after acquiring new funding, Austen's letters have become part of the displayed collection. Here is a guided audio tour of the cottage.

I really love the interviews I turned up this round. There is this 2002 gem with Harriet Walter, who besides being a thoroughly interesting, talented and intelligent woman, played Mrs John Dashwood in '95 Sense and Sensibility. Here she talks about playing one of Shakespeare's great women, Beatrice, in Much Ado About Nothing.

She has featured in two Austen adaptations, '83 Mansfield Park as Maria Bertram and '96 Emma as Mrs Weston. She's a lovely, clever, funny woman and in 2002 Samantha Bond played Lady Macbeth on stage with the super sexy, genuine, talented and, personally my favourite actor, Sean Bean.

Juliet Stevenson is one of a very small handful of truly brilliant actors alive today. As well as being a remarkably talented stage and screen actor, she known for her excellent narration of novels, including all of Austen's works (she was voted as BBC Radio's favourite reader) and radio work. She played Mrs Elton in the '95 Emma film, she's an absolutely fascinating woman and here Juliet Stevenson talks about her absorbing role in Tom Murphy's remarkable play Alice Trilogy.

You can play these radio items with Real Player, simply follow 'Listen to This Item'. If you need to install Real Player, you can download it from their website free of charge.

Old Bits & Bobs from The Beeb

Idly wading through the vast BBC radio archives online this afternoon I came across a few Austen related bits and bobs from the past. To listen to the interviews follow the links and click the Listen to This Item button.

Ten years after playing Elizabeth Bennett in the BBC Pride and Prej, Jennifer Ehle discusses playing the lead at the Old Vic in The Philadelphia Story with her old Mr Wickham, Adrien Lukas.

Now, I kind of completely love Emilia Fox and she is one of my absolutely favourite young actors. Fans of the 1995 BBC Pride & Prej will have seen her play Georgiana Darcy so charmingly and as she does a lot of work in TV and on stage in the UK, I don't see much of her here in Canada. But she has so much charisma and seems so lovely and intelligent. She played the heroine in a 1997 Masterpeice Theatre production of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, the DVD of which is sitting patiently in my Amazon wishlist, played Dorotea in The Pianist and here, amongst other things, Emilia Fox talks about playing Madame de Tourvel in Les Liasons Dangereuses on stage in 2003, all of which I love.

Author PD James has the hots for Persuasion's Captain Frederick Wentworth. Well, don't we all.