Lesley Castle (Dramatic Reading) - Free Audiobook
1/10Letter the First
Lesley Castle (Dramatic Reading)
LETTER 4th LAURA to MARIANNE
LETTER 4th
LAURA to MARIANNE
Our neighbourhood was small, for it consisted only of your Mother. She may probably have already told you that being left by her Parents in indigent Circumstances she had retired into Wales on eoconomical motives. There it was our freindship first commenced. Isobel was then one and twenty. Tho’ pleasing both in her Person and Manners (between ourselves) she never possessed the hundredth part of my Beauty or Accomplishments. Isabel had seen the World. She had passed 2 Years at one of the first Boarding-schools in London; had spent a fortnight in Bath and had supped one night in Southampton.
“Beware my Laura (she would often say) Beware of the insipid Vanities and idle Dissipations of the Metropolis of England; Beware of the unmeaning Luxuries of Bath and of the stinking fish of Southampton.”
“Alas! (exclaimed I) how am I to avoid those evils I shall never be exposed to? What probability is there of my ever tasting the Dissipations of London, the Luxuries of Bath, or the stinking Fish of Southampton? I who am doomed to waste my Days of Youth and Beauty in an humble Cottage in the Vale of Uske.”
Ah! little did I then think I was ordained so soon to quit that humble Cottage for the Deceitfull Pleasures of the World.
Adeiu.
Laura.
About
Lesley Castle is a melodramatic epistolary novelette written by Jane Austen when she was sixteen years old. Although the novels Austen became known for were not published until she was in her thirties, she was an active writer from the age of twelve, frequently composing epistolary works such as Lesley Castle. Austen eventually compiled 29 of her early writings in three notebooks that became known as the Juvenilia and that she called “Volume the First”, “Volume the Second”, and “Volume the Third”, including Lesley Castle in “Volume the Second”. Lesley Castle is set contemporaneously to Austen’s writing and consists of a series of ten letters by five characters, all of whom are women of high society living in Great Britain. In this short work, Austen employs a mock serious tone to humorously critique her peers on subjects such as self-absorption and jealousy. Austen acknowledged in a prefatory note that she left Lesley Castle unfinished; it includes several interconnected storylines, but no overarching plot or clear conclusion. - Summary by David Purdy
Jane Austen: Michelle Purdy Henry Thomas Austen: Jake Malizia Margaret Lesley: Michele Eaton Charlotte Lutterell: Kelly S. Taylor Susan Lesley: Magda Wilde Eloisa Lutterell: Amatullah Talks Mrs. Marlowe: Joanna Michal Hoyt William Fitzgerald: David Purdy Mr. Lesley: Tomas Peter Narrator: WillForbis
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