Pride and Prejudice, Alison Larkin and Edith Wharton – an audio celebration!
Here is an article in the Berkshire Eagle by Kate Abbott which will explain why I’ve been too busy to blog for awhile! Alison Larkin and Edith Wharton celebrate 200 years of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ By Kate Abbott, Berkshires Week Editor POSTED: 12/05/2013 01:26:12 AM EST UPDATED: 12/05/2013 03:46:38 PM EST Actor and author Alison Larkin will perform Saturday at The Mount to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and Larkin’s new audiobook reading of the novel. (Eagle file) LENOX — Elizabeth Bennett is a friend sharing a silent joke, looking at you straight-faced until you dissolve into helpless giggles. She is a sister sitting on the edge of your bed in the small hours. She throws open the door and comes in wind-blown on a bright, clear day. And her spirit always rises to meet any attempt to intimidate it — in Jane Austen’s words. She is the heroine of Austen’s novel, “Pride and Prejudice,” and she will celebrate her 200th birthday in Edith Wharton’s living room on Saturday with a high tea, stories and music. Alison Larkin first read “Pride and Prejudice” when she was 15. “I fell in love with Mr. Darcy, as we all do,” she said. Now living in the Berkshires, Larkin, writer and performer and author of “The English American,” was raised in Sussex, England, not far from where Jane Austen lived and wrote. She has recently and intimately rediscovered the novel as an adult. “Now I read it and there’s so much wisdom behind the wit and the story,” she said. In honor of the novel’s 200th anniversary, Larkin has read “Pride and Prejudice” aloud in a new audiobook produced by Jason Brown and the Monterey-based Berkshire Media Arts. On Saturday she will perform music as Elizabeth might have sung it at a party and read aloud from the novel. “Getting to play all the parts is heaven,” she said. She felt she knew them all. She reveled in their voices: ironical Mr. Bennett and his chattering wife, the hilariously smug Mr. Collins, Lady Catherine de Bough gracing the world with her opinions, and Elizabeth’s generous sister, Jane, wrestling with her first unhappy love — and Mr. Wickham’s immediate charm, and Darcy’s cool reserve and unexpected fire. At the center, Elizabeth’s is a love story. Finding her own way, she is learning to tell love from desire and to open herself to both. She is “looking for the soul-mate who completes her,” Larkin said, and folowing her “we are recognizing that we’re all frightened of love and looking for what’s real.” As she read, she found the novel resonating with her own book, in her own journey between two countries, two sets of parents — and two men. “I’ve come to value integrity and honesty, the qualities Darcy has, as well as his looks,” she said. She said it with a glint in her eye. She wants to bring out the fun in Austen, she said: Too many readers have made Austen sound ponderous. Larkin hopes to make her words light and bright — Asten is mischieviously funny. Some scenes Larkin had to re-read because she kept breaking down into laughter. But the laughter has depths beneath it. Austen writes with real wry warmth in her voice. She also faces realities — forced marriage, failed marriage, the threat of bankrupcy and child molestation. Elizabeth Bennet’s youngest sister is 15. “Lydia is often portrayed as too silly,” Larkin said. “She’s a lively 15-year-old in an isolated part of England.” Lydia is thoughtless, untaught and in danger of hurting herself badly. Until she read the book aloud, Larkin said, she had little empathy for Lydia — but as she read, she found new compassion for her. Lydia is oblivious. She feels like any young teen in a newspaper story today who has been taken advantage of. And today’s teens can find the book grippingly close to home. Larkin has heard from a 16-year-old listener who had never read the book, who called to say she loves it, and that she has found people like Austen’s characters in her own life. And a group of 7- to 10-year-old readers will come to the tea, said Kelsey Mullen, public programs coordinator at Edith Wharton’s home, The Mount, which will host the tea on Saturday. Wharton read Austen, and many people since have compared them. They were two bright writers writing when most writers were men and commenting on a society they knew intimately, Larkin said. Both won acknowledgement in their own times, and both made a living as writers, said Rebecka McDougall, communications director at The Mount. And both write with a clear eye and a good ear. They have a gift for “getting to the heart of the point without directly offending anybody — and using the full English language, which is so refreshing,” Mullen said. Larkin finds Austen funny and sharp and brazenly sane. “Human nature is the same,” she said. “We fall in love without realizing we’re in love. The questions women face, how dependent women still are on the men they marry or are born to,” all the tensions and dramas go on now as they did 200 years ago. Any writer who writes what she thinks and feels will touch people centuries later, Larkin said, and she can imagine nothing better than to celebrate the 200th birthday of the book with a high tea overlooking Wharton’s quiet gardens and lake shore. “The Mount is my favorite place,” she said. Austen might have felt at home here, talking with Wharton on her terrace or bicycling with her along the back roads. Austen loved the outdoors. She took long walks with her sister, and Elizabeth walks three miles across the fields on a bright and muddy morning after the rain, to see Jane. Sussex is a beautiful part of England, Larkin said, a place of woods and hills. When she moved to the Berkshires, she felt
From Shadows on the Nile to Pride and Prejudice – Audiobook give away!
Occasionally I’m given an audiobook book to narrate that causes me to fall ever so slightly in love. I can’t stop thinking about one or more of the characters or the book. There’s something about the author’s spirit that feels familiar. I’m restless and distracted until I can be back in the studio, inhabiting the characters and world that I feel connected to and that I’ve been given the task of bringing to audio life. This happened to me with bestselling author Kate Furnivall’s new novel, Shadows on the Nile just released in the US by Tantor audio. (To purchase and listen to a sample click Shadows on the Nile. ) When we think of Egypt these days we usually think of war, kidnappings, violence and death. It’s been awhile since the great civilization that preceded Rome made it into the news. Remember Tutenkhamen? The Valley of the Kings? You will when you listen to this one. Oh, right! Egypt! That Egypt. Shadows on the Nile starts in 1912. Jessie hears a scream in the night coming from her young brother, Georgie, who has autism – and she wakes to find him gone. Haunted by the same nightmare, twenty years later Jessie’s other brother disappears. Desperate to find him, Jessie is led into a world of seances, mystics and Egyptian artifacts. We get to visit the Valley of the Dead and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which started at around that time. We’re in the hands of a master storyteller, so while being hugely entertained we also get a sense of how modern day Egypt came to be. It’s a rollicking adventure full of excitement with an unlikely hero – Georgie – who is so beautifully portrayed we get an authentic sense of what it might be like to be autistic ourselves. There’s a love story too – between two people who dislike each other at first – and the narrative drive is unrelenting. You just have to know what happens next. Sometimes it can be a jolt moving from one audiobook narration to another. But this time the transition was a smooth one. The day after I finished Shadows on the Nile, I took a brief turn in the garden to start thinking about my next audiobook, The 200th Anniversary audio edition of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. As I re-acquainted myself with Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, I thought about all the people who have read Jane Austen’s most famous novel since it first came out two hundred years ago. It was still as popular in the 1930’s as it is today. As I walk in the garden, I imagine I’m a young woman escaping from the British Embassy party in Cairo in Kate Furnivall’s Egypt by pretending to have a headache. I don’t have a headache at all. I just want to get back to the book I’m reading – Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. With the distant sound of The Lonely Ash Grove coming from the party below, I get into bed and reach under the mosquito net for the leatherbound copy of Pride and Prejudice that my grandmother gave me for my birthday. I want to find out if the hero and heroine, who dislike each other at first, will come to realize, by the end of the book, that they have already found true love. And I read all night because, as is always the case with a marvelous book, I just have to know what happens next. . . To listen to The Lonely Ash Grove and other English music that would have been familiar to the characters in both novels, click here. To enter for a chance to win one of 5 copies of the MP3-CD, click here. Give away closes November 21 and is open to residents of the US only. https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/71453-shadows-on-the-nile Visit Kate Furnivall’s website at www.katefurnivall.com. For more info about Alison Larkin, visit www.alisonlarkin.com .
This House Is Haunted by John Boyne. Audiobook giveaway today. Happy Halloween!
I don’t usually read ghost stories because – well, I’m a wimp. But when Hilary Rose at Tantor Audio asks me if I’m available to narrate a book for them, I clear my schedule and say ‘yes!’ Because the quality of the books she has been choosing for me recently is outstanding. This House is Haunted by NY Times bestselling author John Boyne, set in England during the time of Charles Dickens may be the best yet. I was fine – at first. The horror builds slowly, quietly with an underlying humor so you don’t realize what’s happening at first. I got to read a wonderful scene when Charles Dickens – by all reports as marvelous an actor as he was a writer – gives a “devilish” reading of “The Signal-Man.” I could do this. No problem. Then the heroine, quiet, literary Eliza, arrives at Gaudlin Hall to look after two children. Who are alone. There are no adults present. Terrifying things happen in the dark that may or may not be initiated by the living. Boyne has a superb ear for dialogue and much of the power of this book is due to his understated, subtle writing style which I felt it was crucial to mirror in the narration. A case of less is more – and his portrayal of the children is so powerful because of he doesn’t over write them. At one particularly scary point, just as a dark force started blowing Eliza Cain across the room, a door banged downstairs in my kitchen – and I screamed. You will too. Happy Halloween. To celebrate the release of This House Is Haunted a Goodreads giveaway has been set up for a chance to win one of five MP3-CDs from Oct 31-Nov 7! Open to residents of the US only. Clck on link at bottom of this page to enter and WIN! https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/70517-this-house-is-haunted
True love
The truth is I really love my work. I know some people like to take a break from work. Not me. What’s more interesting that writing a novel you feel compelled to write? Or narrating something that engages your soul? ZIp. Of course there is the exhaustion thing. “Why don’t you take a break?” a friend says. “Come out with us on Saturday. It’ll be fun.” No it won’t. I’d be itching to get back to the audiobook I’m narrating for Tantor. Or writing up the scene I’ve been thinking about putting into my new novel for over a week. Thing is, I know Mia has to experience intense chemistry and connection with someone the moment they meet, question is where do they meet? On the plane? By the bookstand at the airport? Taking their shoes off before going through security? And what is she going to do? Let him know how she feels? Or feign indifference, as she usually does. I’ve my own novel to finish, two books to narrate and a screenplay of The English American to complete. I’ve a lot on my plate. I can do all of it if I get up at 4.30 and ignore the laundry and the cooking. And when I’m so tired I can’t see, perhaps then I’ll consider taking a trip to the ocean. As long as I can bring my laptop.
Writing in New England in the Fall
I’m working achingly hard this month – narrating the 200th Anniversary audio edition of Pride and Prejudice – and writing the second draft of my new book. And even though I don’t have time to hike up Monument Mountain or walk with a friend, as I put myself through the emotional roller coaster writing a novel seems to send me on, this time I’m surrounded by mountains and mist and burnished leaves. I have to leave the house for most of the day because Tim the builder and his team of bangers are hard at work on the porch – on which I plan spending a great deal of time once it’s finished. (The delay, apparently, has to do with the building inspector taking his sweet time to drive half a minute up the hill to give Tim the thumbs up on the electrical sockets.) As I head down the hill to find a quiet place to write before the kids come home and require feeding – which they seem to expect EVERY SINGLE DAY – I get to see nature at it’s most majestic. It’s only a few minutes walk and I am trying to figure out a plot point in my book – but the leaves are swirling at my feet as I do so and they are red and burnished brown and whoa! Feel the wind!
Shadows on the Nile by Kate Furnivall
Occasionally I’m given an audiobook book to narrate that causes me to fall ever so slightly in love. I can’t stop thinking about one or more of the characters or the book. There’s something about the author’s spirit that feels familiar. I’m restless and distracted until I can be back in the studio, inhabiting the characters and world that I feel connected to and that I’ve been given the task of bringing to audio life. This happened to me with bestselling author Kate Furnivall’s new novel, Shadows on the Nile just released in the US by Tantor audio. (To purchase and listen to a sample click Shadows on the Nile. ) When we think of Egypt these days we usually think of war, kidnappings, violence and death. It’s been awhile since the great civilization that preceded Rome made it into the news. Remember Tutenkhamen? The Valley of the Kings? You will when you listen to this one. Oh, right! Egypt! That Egypt. Shadows on the Nile starts in 1912. Jessie hears a scream in the night coming from her young brother, Georgie, who has autism – and she wakes to find him gone. Haunted by the same nightmare, twenty years later Jessie’s other brother disappears. Desperate to find him, Jessie is led into a world of seances, mystics and Egyptian artifacts. We get to visit the Valley of the Dead and members of the Muslim brotherhood, which started at around that time. We’re in the hands of a master storyteller, so while being hugely entertained we also get a sense of how modern day Egypt came to be. It’s a rollicking adventure full of excitement with an unlikely hero – Georgie – who is so beautifully portrayed we get an authentic sense of what it might be like to be autistic ourselves. There’s a love story too – between two people who dislike each other at first- and the narrative drive is unrelenting. You just have to know what happens next. Sometimes it can be a jolt moving from one audiobook narration to another. But this time the transition was a smooth one. The day after I finished Shadows of the Nile, I took a brief turn in the garden, to start thinking about my next audiobook The 200th Anniversary audio edition of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. As I re-acquainted myself with Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, I thought about all the people who have read Jane Austen’s most famous novel since it first came out two hundred years ago. It was still as popular in the 1930’s as it is today. As I take my turn, I imagine I’m a young woman escaping from the British Embassy party in Cairo in Kate Furnivall’s Egypt by pretending to have a headache. I don’t have a headache at all. I just want to get back to the book I’m reading – Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I get into bed and reach under the mosquito net for the leather bound copy of Pride and Prejudice that my grandmother gave me for my birthday. I want to find out if the hero and heroine, who dislike each other at first, will come to realize, by the end of the book, that they have already found true love. And I read all night because, as is always the case with a marvelous book, I just have to know what happens next. . . Visit Kate Furnivall’s website at www.katefurnivall.com. For more info about Alison, visit www.alisonlarkin.com .
Alison in Audiobook Land
Alison In Audiobook Land “Alison where have you been. I haven’t heard from you in months,” my friend says. “I’ve been traveling,” I say. Which is true. Technically speaking. Since I started working pretty much full time as an audiobook narrator I’ve traveled across continents and through time. All without having to stand in line at the airport or leave my home studio – aka The Tardis. Here’s how it happened. Soon after I narrated my own novel, The English American, (Simon and Schuster and Audible 2008), the folks at Audible asked me if I’d like to narrate all twelve books in Arthur Ransome’s classic British children’s series, starting with Swallows and Amazons. To quote Dorothy Parker “I hate writing. I love having written.” So I was delighted to be offered an absorbing distraction. By the time I’d finished narrating the last novel in Arthur Ransome’s series – see blog – I knew I’d found something new that I truly love to do. Years ago, before I moved to America and became a stand-up comic/voiceartist/novelist/screenwriter, I trained as a classical actress at the Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. I’d acted with the Royal National Theater on Broadway and with the R.S.C. And although I secretly preferred stand-up comedy, because you can change the lines every night if you want – woe betide the classical actor who does that – I missed acting. And I missed voice work – before moving East to raise my kids, I’d spent six years in LA voicing cartoons, movies, cd roms, anything with a British, Australian, South African, New Zealand or European accent. So audiobook narration was right up my alley. “What’s an earphones award?’ my English mother said over the phone when Brilliance released the audiobook of The English American on cd in April 2012 and I told her I’d been given one. “Well,” I said, looking out the window of my New England farmhouse, “it’s when someone walks up the drive carrying a pair of earphones on a red velvet cushion, solemnly praising my narration.” “Really?” my mother said. “No,” I said. “But I did get a certificate and a lovely review from Audiofile and then I got a call from Tantor.” “Tantor the elephant?” my English father said. “No,” I said, “the audiobook company.” A wonderful woman called Hilary from Tantor had called out of the blue and asked me if I’d like to narrate at least a dozen books for them in a variety of genres over the next year. From home. What? No driving? I was delighted. The first book Tantor sent me was a witty, delightful Regency romance called The Surrender of Miss Fairbourne. Two weeks later I was in modern day London narrating What The Nanny Saw. Then, in June, Tantor said, “Would you like to narrate a steam punk romance?” “Steam punk?” I said. “What’s that?” They sent me Meljean Brook’s Riveted. And I was. I think one of the reasons I love narrating audiobooks is because it’s impossible to get bored. Each world I’m asked to enter is different. And I love playing my part in ensuring the listener has to drive around the block a few more times because she has to know what happens next. Plus I never – ever – have to brush my hair. In the 60 plus books I’ve narrated since I began working as an audiobook narrator I’ve been to New Zealand with the Booker Prize nominated novel The Forrests, Australia with the Magic or Madness Y/A series for young adults , War torn Guernsey with the superb literary novel The Soldier’s Wife. I’ve been mesmerized by the supernatural in Tudor England as a mystery and manuscript are uncovered in The Serpent Garden. I’ve been to a haunted English house with Edith Wharton in Ghosts, I’ve fallen in love with dashing heroes and witty heroines in the charming historical romances The Autumn Bride and Loving Lady Marcia. And I’ve been to London, Oxford, Croatia and beyond with the heroine’s and villains in Tily Bagshawe’s glamorous, sexy blockbusters Fame, Scandalous and Flawless. I’ve watched a young English woman fight mythical vampires in the Oklahoma desert with She Returns From War. I spent two months in Tudor England with King Henry the V111th narrating all five novels in Kate Emerson’s superb five book series for Audible Ink – Secrets of the Tudor Court. And I was privileged to narrate all 31 hours and 15 minutes of the first Gothic novel – Ann Radcliffe’s great classic The Mysteries of Udolpho. Last month I was transported to Scotland while narrating the hugely entertaining romantic Duchess Diaries series starting with To Capture a Countess and then to futuristic London where vampires vie with metal men who are only half human in Bec McMaster’s haunting, sexy new London steampunk series Kiss of Steel and Heart of Iron When I say I’ve been to these places – click here for a longer list – I mean it. Because my job is to read every single word, telling the story as if it’s really happening, I feel everything each character thinks and feels as the story goes along. The journey can be funny, harrowing, exciting, disturbing, educational – sometimes all of these things at the same time. Sometimes – as in Sunday Times columnist Bee Wilson’s Consider The Fork which won an Audiofile Best non-fiction award for 2012 – it’s a non-fiction journey and I learn about something I never thought I’d be interested in – in this case, the history of kitchen implements. Not being a great cook it’s not a book I’d have rushed out to buy myself. But in Bee Wilson’s witty, delightful hands, the subject is really fascinating. As I was making plans to head off to the Audio Publisher’s Association Conference in New York last week I had a call from London asking me to give notes on the latest draft of the screenplay of The English American. “The script is almost ready to go out to stars,” the producers said. “Do you need
You know you’re a British expat if
YOU KNOW YOU’RE A BRITISH EXPAT IF . . . …on July 4th you don’t know whether to celebrate or mourn the shrinking of the British Empire. So you wear black and eat a hot dog. ….every American you meet tells you they love everything about the British – ‘from your cute little roads to your accommodating little Prime Ministers.’ …you are getting used to Americans telling you everything about themselves in the first sentence: “Hi. I’m Maryanne. I’m an alcoholic, co-dependent, cross-addicted, enabling incest survivor.” …an American invites you to ‘come visit us in Cleveland’ and you’re astonished to find out that they actually mean it. Take a Brit up on such an invitation and you’ll spend the weekend with an impeccably polite British host seething with unexpressed resentment that you actually believed her when she said she’d love you to come and stay any time. …during the Olympics, when the Americans end up with thirty-two gold medals and the British with one, you’re relieved it’s that way around. You’ve lived here long enough to know that winning is the only thing that matters in America, and the British are so much happier when their countrymen are doing badly. (The only reason they tolerate Richard Branson is because he consistently fails to get around the world in his hot air balloon.) …you find yourself surrounded by people with names you’d definitely not call a Brit. Like Madison, Logan, Dakota, Randy and John Thomas. Any more than you’d call an American Phillippa, Graham, Hamish, Tarquin or Dido. … you still find yourself cringing with British embarrassment when an Americans tells you they love you. …. you came to America expecting to find it full of gum-chewing, gun-bearing, brash, self-centered people who rush about telling perfect strangers to stick things up each others bottoms. Instead you find a nation of encouraging, optimistic people who say “Go for it!” as often as your friends back in England said “Ooooh, I wouldn’t try and do that if I were you.”
From New England to Tudor England
I have been narrating audio books pretty much without pause for almost a year now, with little time to blog, but I’ve missed it – and you – and I’ll be back! I will write in more detail about my new life in audiobook narration soon. For now, my answer to the ‘where have you been?’ question is this. I’ve been traveling without having to stand in line at the airport. During the last I’ve narrated audiobooks set in New Zealand, Australia, Oxford, Regency London, France, Hollywood and the Oklahoma desert. When you’re narrating you have to read every single word – no skimming allowed. Today I’m heading off to Tudor England where Bloody Mary is earning her nickname in the skilled hands of author Kate Emerson. See you soon!
Oliver! Oliver!
The last time I acted in a play was fifteen years ago on Broadway in a very erudite, serious play called Stanley with Anthony Sher that had been at the Royal National Theatre and was being re-cast in New York. I’d been in New York doing stand-up comedy for five years when this happened and being a part of a play again felt like coming home. I trained as a classical actress in London, I played leads in repertory theater before coming to the States – and doing a play again was familiar. I got to hang out with real British actors, like Anna Chancellor and Selina Cadel and watch John Caird direct. He directed Les Miserables, and I felt like I’d arrived. In stand-up comedy you can say whatever you want – as long as it’s funny. In theater you have to stick to someone else’s script, word for word, or they’ll fire you. Four months of saying the same lines every night took their toll on my soul – that’s British for I was bored to tears. The run finally ended. I sighed with relief. I’ve been writing books, performing solo comedy, doing cartoon and film voices, playing with my kids and avoiding theatre ever since. And then, two months ago, the little boy I gave birth to 11 years ago was cast as The Artful Dodger at the 800 seat Colonial theatre in Pittsfield in a superb community theater production of Oliver! His sister is in Fagin’s gang and Yours Truly is playing the evil Widow Corney. It’s been six weeks of intense rehearsal for four performances. There are 220 people in the cast. It’s much harder work than any professional theater I’ve ever done. And much more fun. Why? In addition to seeing my son’s natural charisma light up the stage, I get to yell at 150 kids to ‘GO TO BED!” And they do!