Gillian Gill has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 4 ratings. The most-rated is We Two.
We Two
Summary
It was the most influential marriage of the 19th century and one of history's most enduring love stories. Traditional biographies tell us that Queen Victoria inherited the throne as a naive teenager, when the British Empire was at the height of its power, and seemed doomed to find failure as a monarch and misery as a woman until she married her German cousin Albert and accepted him as her lord and master. Now renowned chronicler Gillian Gill turns this familiar story on its head, revealing a strong, feisty queen and a brilliant, fragile prince working together to build a family based on support, trust, and fidelity, qualities neither had seen much of as children. The love affair that emerges is far more captivating, complex, and relevant than that depicted in any previous account. The epic relationship began poorly. The cousins first met as teenagers for a few brief, awkward, chaperoned weeks in 1836. At 17, charming rather than beautiful, Victoria already showed signs of wanting her own way. Albert, the boy who had been groomed for her since birth, was chubby, self-absorbed, and showed no interest in girls, let alone this princess. So when they met again in 1839 as queen and presumed prince-consort-to-be, neither had particularly high hopes. But the queen was delighted to discover a grown man, refined, accomplished, and whiskered. "Albert is beautiful!" Victoria wrote, and she proposed just three days later. As Gill reveals, Victoria and Albert entered their marriage longing for intimate companionship, yet each was determined to be the ruler. This dynamic would continue through the years, with each spouse, headstrong and impassioned, eager to lead the marriage on his or her own terms. For two decades, Victoria and Albert engaged in a very public contest for dominance.
©2009 Gillian Gill (P)2009 Random House
Virginia Woolf
Summary
An insightful, witty look at Virginia Woolf through the lens of the extraordinary women closest to her. How did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf? Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies - of strength, style, and creativity - shaped Woolf’s path to the radical writing that inspires so many today. Gill casts back to Woolf’s French-Anglo-Indian maternal great-grandmother, Thérèse de L’Etang, an outsider to English culture whose beauty passed powerfully down the female line; and to Woolf’s aunt, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who gave Woolf her first vision of a successful female writer. Yet it was the women in her own family circle who had the most complex and lasting effect on Woolf. Her mother, Julia, and sisters, Stella, Laura, and Vanessa, were all like Woolf herself, but in markedly different ways, warped by the male-dominated household they lived in. Finally, Gill shifts the lens onto the famous Bloomsbury group. This, Gill convinces, is where Woolf called upon the legacy of the women who shaped her to transform a group of men - united in their love for one another and their disregard for women - into a society in which Woolf ultimately found her freedom and her voice. Read by Nicola Barber - Nicola Barber’s voice can be heard on television shows and radio commercials, popular video games such as World of Warcraft, and even in talking toys. But her true passion lies in bringing to life the characters and scenes in novels, a talent for which she has received multiple Earphones and Audie Awards. Nicola is also an Audie nominee in the prestigious “Solo Female Narration” category for her work on Murphy’s Law (Rhys Bowen) and Call the Midwife (Jennifer Worth).
©2019 Gillian Gill (P)2019 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company