Audiobook · read by volunteers
Midnight Queen
May Agnes Fleming (1840–1880)
Read by Annika Feilbach, Becca B, Jessi, Rayne, Nienke, Linda Ferguson, Dorlene Kaplan, Lars Rolander (1942-2016), MaryAnn, Grace Dobson · 23 chapters · 9 h 23
About the book
London, 1665, the year of the plague. Sir Norman Kingsley visits a soothsayer known as La Masque, who shows him a vision of a beautiful young woman. Soon afterwards he is astonished to come across her in the flesh, and in such dreadful circumstances that he saves her from being buried alive. He takes her home to be cared for, but when he goes to fetch a doctor she vanishes. With his friend Ormistan he sets out to learn who she is and where she has gone. Chapter titles such as The Sorceress, The Dead Bride, The Court Page and The Dwarf and the Ruin promise a feast of sensation. May Agnes Fleming, Canada’s first best-selling novelist, writes in the full-blooded manner of Victorian popular fiction. Ten LibriVox volunteers share its twenty-three chapters, about nine and a half hours of crime, romance and the fantastic.
Introduction
May Agnes Fleming, who lived from 1840 to 1880, is renowned as Canada’s first best-selling novelist. She wrote forty-two novels, many of which were published in instalments and some only after her death, and her work was widely read in the English-speaking world during the later nineteenth century. Born in Saint John, New Brunswick, she published her serials in American weekly papers before they appeared as books. Her stories belong to the tradition of sensation fiction, in which secrets, disguises and dramatic reversals drive the plot.
The Midnight Queen, published in 1876, is set in London in the year of the plague, 1665, which Daniel Defoe made famous in his Journal of the Plague Year; Fleming uses it as a backdrop for romance rather than as documentary. Its chapters, with titles such as the sorceress, the dead bride and the court page, show how it mixes historical setting with mystery, romance and the fantastic. It is classed as crime and mystery fiction, fantastic fiction and historical fiction, and it moves quickly between them.
Fleming’s style is vivid and melodramatic, with strong emotions and clear contrasts between hero and villain. Modern readers should not expect a careful reconstruction of the seventeenth century. The period serves mainly as a colourful backdrop for the intrigue.
The recording has twenty-three chapters, shared among ten LibriVox volunteers, and lasts about nine and a half hours. The chapters are well suited to listening in instalments, much as they were first read. Today it is worth hearing as a lively example of popular Victorian fiction, and as a way to discover a writer who was once a household name and has since been largely forgotten.
Public domain
May Agnes Fleming died in 1880: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text