Trilby [3 Editions] - George du Maurier Audiobook

Written by George du Maurier
Read by Nadia May, Peter Joyce, Bianca Amato
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps

Trilby opens in the Latin Quarter of Paris, where Trilby O’Ferrall is working as an artist’s model. Her grace and ingenuous charm make a poignant contrast to the cruel magnetism of Svengali, under whose spell she falls. Using hypnotic powers, Svengali shapes her into a virtuoso singer, Europe’s most captivating soprano. But her golden voice, and even her life, become fatally tied to him.

Trilby was all the rage when it appeared in 1894, spawning songs, shoes, and most famously, the Trilby hat. This novel holds a mirror up to the art and science of the fin de siècle and to its darkest obsessions - most disturbingly, anti-Semitism - as well as to crime, sexuality and the occult, music and mesmerism, and investigations of hysteria and the unconscious.

-

Trilby opens in the Latin Quarter of Paris where Trilby O’Ferrall works as an artist’s model. Her grace and ingenuous charm make a poignant contrast to the cruel magnetism of Svengali, under whose spell she falls. Using hypnotic powers, Svengali shapes her into a virtuoso singer, the toast of Europe, but her golden voice, and even her life, become fatally tied to him.

-

Full of the author’s joie de vivre, this tale revels in the artistic life of 19th Century Paris. Three friends, perfect companions for each other, try to make their way as painters in the Bohemian climate of the left bank of the Seine, but then Little Billee falls in love. The object of his affections is Trilby, a gamine figure of the streets and artists’ model.

Trilby is under the influence of the strange Svengali who hypnotises her to make her sing. It is not Svengali, however, who is responsible for Trilby’s downfall. Du Maurier surely lays that blame on the class system of the time. It is not Trilby’s lifestyle that brings tragedy but Victorian attitudes - the worthy encompassed by the inevitable. It is a love story brim full of rumbustious reminiscence with dark undercurrents about mesmeric possession of the soul - an obsession of the period.

About Assembled Stories: Over the years the national press have reviewed Assembled Stories titles as “excellent”, “remarkable”, “entrancing”, “superb”, “magic for sure”, “masterly”, “wonderful”, “a class act” and “a splendid example of audio at its best”.