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The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: The Continuing Adventures of Judith Shakespeare Audiobook
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""Witty, resilient, and fiercely intelligent, Judith emerges as a heroine for the ages. Her journey, rich in historical authenticity and imaginative storytelling, offers insights that resonate across the centuries.""—Christina Baker Kline, New York Times bestselling author of The Exiles
For readers of Hilary Mantel and Madeline Miller, a deeply engrossing work of historical fiction—a tale of a woman of the Shakespeare family struggling to manage both her private grief and public danger.
At the age of sixty-one, Judith Shakespeare, a midwife-apothecary and twin of the long-dead Hamnet, must flee provincial Stratford on horseback to avoid arrest for witchcraft. Her traveling companions are a zealous Puritan woman and child who have been displaced by civil war—the bloody seventeenth-century strife between Royalists and Roundheads. Judith is also leaving her marriage, which has foundered since the wrenching loss of two adult sons to the plague.
The sequel to the author’s My Father Had a Daughter, a tale of Judith in her youth, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter revisits this character for the ages—Shakespeare’s sharp-tongued, witty youngest child, no less feisty in her maturity. Four-hundred years after Judith’s death, Grace Tiffany brings her back onto center stage. Judith’s latest tale offers profound insights—into friendship, motherhood, marriage, religious extremism, and war—which remain resoundingly true today.
This work is narrated in Original Pronunciation, that is, Early Modern English, as a nod to the phonological system of Shakespeare’s time.
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“Period music provides an apt background for a note in the initial credits informing listeners that the pronunciation in this production will be performed in the Early Modern English of Shakespeare’s time. That sets up an immersive transition to the world of sixty-one-year-old Judith…Narrator Mary Jane Wells’s fluted tones and English accent add to the authenticity of the characters…It’s not necessary to be familiar with the literature or history of this era to enjoy this engrossing story. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFile
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“Stellar historical fiction imbued with a rich sense of place.”
— New York Times -
“The unique characters of Jane and Pearl add so much texture to the novel, and Judith herself, witty and indomitable, is a delight. The dialogue and language flow easily with a feel of their time. An immersive, satisfying read.”
— Historical Novel Society
Awards
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Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
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About Grace Tiffany
Grace Tiffany is the author of six other novels, including My Father Had a Daughter, a predecessor to The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter. She is a professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance drama at Western Michigan University, an editor of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and a translator of Jorge Luís Borges’ writings on Shakespeare.
About Mary Jane Wells
Mary Jane Wells (a.k.a. McAllister Lee) is a British actress, writer, voice-over artist, and Earphones Award and Audie Award–winning narrator. A graduate of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, she held a recurring role on the BBC’s Half Moon Investigates and narrated the BBC Three television show My Children, which won a Scottish BAFTA.