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Talking Books

The best of the spoken word from RNIB's Talking Book Studios.

New episodes every Monday to Friday at 2pm and repeated every night at 10pm.

Enjoy an unabridged audiobook, serialised over a number of days and weeks, only on RNIB Connect Radio or listen again to every episode here. Our current book is The Life of Charlotte Bronte written by Elizabeth Gaskell and read by Gabrielle Woolf.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of her close friend Charlotte Brontë was published in 1857 to immediate popular acclaim and remains the most significant study of the enigmatic author who gave Jane Eyre the sub-title ‘An Autobiography’. It recounts Charlotte Brontë’s life from her isolated childhood, through her years as a writer who had ‘foreseen the single life’ for herself, to her marriage at thirty-eight and death less than a year later. The resulting work – the first full-length biography of a woman novelist by a woman novelist – explores the nature of Charlotte’s genius and almost single-handedly created the Brontë myth.

This book runs for 20 episodes until the 9th of April.

The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell

20 episodes

Cover of the biography "The Life of Charlotte Brontë" by Elizabeth Gaskell. A portrait of Charlotte Brontë shows her in a dark, patterned dress with a lace collar and a red bow. She holds a small, brown book. The title and author are in a classic serif font.