Audiobook · read by volunteers
Seven Wives and Seven Prisons; Or, Experiences in the Life of a Matrimonial Monomaniac
L. A. Abbott (1813–1870)
Read by Nathalie J. · 15 chapters · 3 h 53
About the book
Seven wives, seven prisons, and one thoroughly unrepentant narrator. In this comic memoir, published in 1870, the author claims that his is a true story, and sets out to explain how he came to marry seven different women and how each marriage ended in disaster and, more often than not, a spell behind bars. What follows is a tongue-in-cheek chain of mishaps, misunderstandings and farcical entanglements, told in a rambling, breathless style by a man who cannot resist the idea of matrimony. Whether you take his protestations of honesty seriously or not, the humour is irrepressible, and the book gives a lively picture of nineteenth-century manners and eccentric enthusiasms. Fifteen chapters, read by a single volunteer, fill just under four hours. If you enjoy gently absurd storytelling and a good-natured rogue, you may find yourself laughing from the first chapter.
Introduction
L. A. Abbott (1813–1870) is the name attached to this curious book, and little else about him is reliably known. The work was published in 1870, the year of his death, and it is presented as an autobiographical account of a man who has been married seven times and sent to prison on seven occasions as a result. The subtitle describes him as a matrimonial monomaniac, which gives a good idea of the spirit of the thing.
Whether the story is literally true is another matter. The author insists that it is, but the tone is so openly comic, and the events so absurd, that readers have always been free to treat it as a piece of humorous fiction presented as fact. This kind of mock-memoir, in which a narrator describes his own follies with a perfectly straight face, was a familiar form in nineteenth-century American humour. The book is best enjoyed as a tongue-in-cheek lament from someone who cannot stop falling in love, and who is perpetually surprised by the consequences.
The recording was made by LibriVox volunteer Nathalie J. It runs for about three hours and fifty minutes and is split into fifteen chapters, so it is easy to listen to in stages. The language is lively, the situations farcical, and the narrator's obsession is treated with enough affection to keep the comedy from turning sour. For listeners who enjoy period humour, odd bits of social history or simply a good story told with gusto, it is an entertaining discovery from a largely forgotten corner of American literature.
Public domain
L. A. Abbott died in 1870: 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