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Jump to navigationJump to searchThe Complete Barchester Chronicles by Anthony Trollope (view source)
Revision as of 09:19, 11 December 2020
, 09:19, 11 December 2020no edit summary
When I told my daughter that I didn't know what to listen to now that I'd finished [[The Complete Novels: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion by Jane Austen|The Complete Novels of Jane Austen]] for the second time on the trot she had the perfect answer: The Barchester Chronicles and they were in my inbox in a matter of minutes. They're not ''quite'' as well known as the Austen books but they're an excellent follow on.
The first point to make is that this is a dramatisation of the novels and when it says on Amazon that it's 'unabridged' it means that the dramatisation is unabridged rather than the novels. When you read the novels you'll find a great deal of internal monologue which wouldn't sit well in a radio play, but if you're OK with getting a 'flavour' of the books then you're in for a treat. You can judge the extent to which the novels have been abridged quite easily. The six Trollope novels in written form are about 30% longer than the six Austen novels, which suggests that the unabridged audio would be about 97 hours rather than the 18 hours 46 minutes of the dramatisation. It's probably not one for the purist but it's value if you're looking for an enjoyable story.
The six books are ''The Warden'', ''Barchester Towers'','' Doctor Thorne'', ''Framley Parsonage'', ''The Small House at Allington'' and ''The Last Chronicle of Barset''. ''The Warden'' was published in 1855. The first of the Austen novels - ''Sense and Sensibility'' was published in 1811, so there's almost half a century's gap between the two writers but both deliver a gentle satire on life at the time with an element of romance.
