Great Expectations

Bestselling novelist and award-winning audiobook narrator Alison Larkin changes the gender of Dicken’s most famous character in this dazzling new recording of Great Expectations.

It’s the same thrilling story of poverty, prison ships, an old woman jilted at the altar, a beautiful, haughty, damaged young woman, a mysterious financial gift that transforms the life of a young person make up some of the drama in this timeless novel. Only one thing has changed. In this version, Pip is a woman.

In this world it is completely normal for a girl to learn to read and kiss another girl and be able to walk into a tavern without being molested or start a promising career thanks to a mysterious financial donation.

It’s an irresistible question. If gender had been simply irrelevant in the 19th century where would we all be now?

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Great Expectations

Bestselling novelist and award-winning audiobook narrator Alison Larkin changes the gender of Dicken’s most famous character in this dazzling new recording of Great Expectations.

It’s the same thrilling story of poverty, prison ships, an old woman jilted at the altar, a beautiful, haughty, damaged young woman, a mysterious financial gift that transforms the life of a young person make up some of the drama in this timeless novel. Only one thing has changed. In this version, Pip is a woman.

In this world it is completely normal for a girl to learn to read and kiss another girl and be able to walk into a tavern without being molested or start a promising career thanks to a mysterious financial donation.

It’s an irresistible question. If gender had been simply irrelevant in the 19th century where would we all be now?

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Great Expectations

Great Expectations

Great Expectations

Great Expectations

Audio CD(Unabridged)

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Overview

Bestselling novelist and award-winning audiobook narrator Alison Larkin changes the gender of Dicken’s most famous character in this dazzling new recording of Great Expectations.

It’s the same thrilling story of poverty, prison ships, an old woman jilted at the altar, a beautiful, haughty, damaged young woman, a mysterious financial gift that transforms the life of a young person make up some of the drama in this timeless novel. Only one thing has changed. In this version, Pip is a woman.

In this world it is completely normal for a girl to learn to read and kiss another girl and be able to walk into a tavern without being molested or start a promising career thanks to a mysterious financial donation.

It’s an irresistible question. If gender had been simply irrelevant in the 19th century where would we all be now?


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781982782337
Publisher: Author's Republic
Publication date: 11/19/2019
Edition description: Unabridged
Product dimensions: 5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

About The Author

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was born in Landport, Portsmouth, England, the second of eight children in a family continually plagued by debt. A legacy brought release from the nightmare of debtors’ prison and child labor and afforded him a few years of formal schooling. He worked as an attorney’s clerk and newspaper reporter until his early writings brought him the amazing success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. He was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era, and he remains popular, responsible for some of English literature’s most iconic characters.


Alison Larkin was born in Washington, DC, adopted at six weeks old by British parents, and raised in England and Africa. After graduating from Royal Holloway College, London University, and the Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, she became a playwright and classical actress on the British stage. Then, at twenty-eight, she found her birth mother, who was living in Bald Mountain, Tennessee. The experience turned her into a stand-up comic. She was soon headlining at the Comic Strip in New York and the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, while maintaining her theatrical career. She also spent three years under a studio development contract to star in her own sitcom with ABC, CBS, and Jim Henson Productions. Her unusually wide range of voices can be heard in cartoons and movies, from work by James Cameron and Robert Altman to Pocahontas and The Wonder Pets. The audiobook of The English American, narrated by Alison, won an AudioFile Earphones Award.

Date of Birth:

February 7, 1812

Date of Death:

June 18, 1870

Place of Birth:

Portsmouth, England

Place of Death:

Gad's Hill, Kent, England

Education:

Home-schooling; attended Dame School at Chatham briefly and Wellington

Read an Excerpt

Chapter I.


My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my
infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than
Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.


I give Pirrip as my father's family name, on the authority of his tombstone
and my sister – Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw
my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for
their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies
regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their
tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea
that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the
character and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,"
I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To
five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were
arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of
five little brothers of mine – who gave up trying to get a living exceedingly
early in that universal struggle – I am indebted for a belief I religiously
entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in
their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of
existence.


Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within as the river wound,
twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the
identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw
afternoon towards evening. At such a time Ifound out for certain, that
this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip
Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were
dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and
Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and
that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes
and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes;
and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant
savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the
small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was
Pip.


"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among
the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil,
or I'll cut your throat!"


A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with
no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A
man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by
stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who
limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in
his head as he seized me by the chin.


"Oh! Don't cut my throat, sir," I pleaded in terror. "Pray don't do it,
sir."


"Tell us your name!" said the man. "Quick!"


"Pip, sir."


"Once more," said the man, staring at me. "Give it mouth!"


From the Paperback edition.

Table of Contents

Introductionvii
Chronology of Charles Dickens's Life and Workxv
Historical Context of Great Expectationsxvii
Great Expectations1
The Original Ending of Great Expectations599
Notes601
Interpretive Notes614
Critical Excerpts621
Questions for Discussion631
Suggestions for the Interested Reader633

What People are Saying About This

George Gissing

Observe how finely the narrative is kept in one key. It begins with a mournful impession—the foggy marshes spreading drearily by the seaward Thames—and throughout recurs this effect of cold and damp and dreariness; in that kind Dickens never did anything so good.... No story in the first person was ever better told.

From the Publisher

"Dickens's figures belong to poetry, like figures of Dante or Shakespeare, in that a single phrase, either by them or about them, may be enough to set them wholely before us."  —T.S. Eliot

"All his characters are my personal friends—I am constantly comparing them with living persons, and living persons with them."  —Tolstoy

"Psychologically the latter part of Great Expectations is about the best thing Dickens ever did."  —George Orwell

John Irving

Great Expectations is the first novel I read that made me wish I had written it; it is the novel that made me want to be a novelist—specifically, to move a reader as I was moved then. I believe that Great Expectations has the most wonderful and most perfectly worked-out plot for a novel in the English language; at the same time, it never deviates from its intention to move you to laugher and tears.

Reading Group Guide

Pip, a poor orphan being raised by a cruel sister, does not have much in the way of great expectations between his terrifying experience in a graveyard with a convict named Magwitch and his humiliating visits with the eccentric Miss Havisham's beautiful but manipulative niece, Estella, who torments him until he is elevated to wealth by an anonymous benefactor. Full of unforgettable characters, Great Expectations is a tale of intrigue, unattainable love, and all of the happiness money can't buy. Great Expectations has the most wonderful and most perfectly worked-out plot for a novel in the English language, according to John Irving, and J. Hillis Miller declares, Great Expectations is the most unified and concentrated expression of Dickens's abiding sense of the world, and Pip might be called the archetypal Dickens hero.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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