Audiobook · read by volunteers
Sisters
Ada Cambridge (1844–1926)
Read by Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014) · 28 chapters · 11 h 25
About the book
Ada Cambridge wrote about families, marriage and the limits placed on women in colonial Australia, and Sisters is one of her later novels. The story follows the four Pennycuick sisters across three or four decades, as their lives are shaped by the choices open to them. It is a novel of domestic drama, in which emotions run deep beneath quiet surfaces, and in which social expectations press upon every decision. Cambridge writes with a clear eye and a sympathetic understanding of her characters, giving the story warmth and moral seriousness. Twenty-eight chapters and more than eleven hours of listening make this a rich, absorbing novel for readers of Victorian and Edwardian fiction. A quiet, thoughtful novel about family ties, sisterhood and the long, slow passage of the years, seen through one household.
Introduction
Ada Cambridge (1844–1926), later known as Ada Cross, was an English-born Australian writer. She was admired as Australia’s first woman poet of note, but her longer-lasting reputation rests on her novels, of which she wrote more than twenty-five. Many of them examine marriage, faith and the position of women in a colonial society that was changing quickly. Sisters was published in 1904.
The recording presents the novel in simple numbered chapters, with no titles to guide the ear. This suits the story’s steady progress, in which the emphasis falls on character rather than spectacle. Cambridge was a keen observer of social life, and her scenes of houses, visits and conversations give a lively picture of how people lived in Australia in the early years of the twentieth century. She was also unafraid to question the conventions she described.
Her work was widely read in her lifetime and has been rediscovered by readers interested in early Australian literature and women’s writing. This novel is a good way to meet her, and the long recording allows the characters to grow familiar.
Twenty-eight recordings, about 11.4 hours in all, are read by a single LibriVox volunteer, one chapter to a recording, so the household of the four Pennycuick sisters becomes familiar through one steady voice. It is a novel to take in over several weeks, a few chapters at a time, and the long span of years covered by the story is felt more strongly when the listening is spread out in this way. Cambridge’s reputation rests on novels like this one, and readers who know only her poetry will find a different register here: prose attentive to manners, money and marriage.
Public domain
Ada Cambridge died in 1926: 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