Great Expectations

Charles Dickens

Oct 2019 · Alison Larkin Presents · Narrated by Alison Larkin

About this audiobook

Bestselling novelist and award-winning audiobook narrator Alison Larkin changes the gender of Dicken’s most famous character in this dazzling new recording of Great Expectations.

It's the same thrilling story of poverty, prison ships, an old woman jilted at the altar, a beautiful, haughty, damaged young woman, a mysterious financial gift that transforms the life of a young person make up some of the drama in this timeless novel. Only one thing has changed. In this version, Pip is a woman.

In this world it is completely normal for a girl to learn to read and kiss another girl and be able to walk into a tavern without being molested or start a promising career thanks to a mysterious financial donation.

It's an irresistible question. If gender had been simply irrelevant in the 19th century where would we all be now?

About the author

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was born in Landport, Portsmouth, England, the second of eight children in a family continually plagued by debt. A legacy brought release from the nightmare of debtors' prison and child labor and afforded him a few years of formal schooling. He worked as an attorney's clerk and newspaper reporter until his early writings brought him the amazing success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. He was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era, and he remains popular, responsible for some of English literature's most iconic characters. Alison Larkin was born in Washington, DC, adopted at six weeks old by British parents, and raised in England and Africa. After graduating from Royal Holloway College, London University, and the Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, she became a playwright and classical actress on the British stage. Then, at twenty-eight, she found her birth mother, who was living in Bald Mountain, Tennessee. The experience turned her into a stand-up comic. She was soon headlining at the Comic Strip in New York and the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, while maintaining her theatrical career. She also spent three years under a studio development contract to star in her own sitcom with ABC, CBS, and Jim Henson Productions. Her unusually wide range of voices can be heard in cartoons and movies, from work by James Cameron and Robert Altman to Pocahontas and The Wonder Pets. The audiobook of The English American, narrated by Alison, won an AudioFile Earphones Award.