Digital Cavendish has strived to collect and present Margaret Cavendish’s work in a variety of forms. In addition to digital texts, we now host an audiobook version of The Blazing World, read by actor James Hyett. Hyett’s reading brings Cavendish’s romancical-philosophical-fantastical work of prose to life. It joins a growing catalogue of Cavendishian audio performances, especially those featured on LibriVox, which includes recordings of selected poems as well as another reading of The Blazing World by Sarah Terry. We are excited to share Hyett’s performance with the Cavendish community.

You can download the album of MP3 files here: Full Audiobook

You can also download the files individually from the Digital Cavendish GitHub repository:

Intro and Front Matter
Dedication
Part 1 – The Abduction
Part 2 – The Journey to Paradise
Part 3 – The Empress
Part 4 – The Bird-men and Bear-men
Part 5 – The Fish-men and Worm-men
Part 6 – The Ape-men and Satyrs
Part 7 – The Spider-, Lice-, Parrot-, Jackdaw-, Magpie-men
Part 8a – Religion and the Immaterial Spirits
Part 8b – Religion and the Immaterial Spirits
Part 9 – The Duchess
Part 10 – The Two Souls Go Travelling
Part 11 – The Matter Between Fortune and the Duke
Part 12 – The Blazing World Goes To War
Part 13 – Return to the Blazing World
Epilogue to the Reader

About the Narrator: James Hyett is a freelance actor, dialect coach, and scholar. He first became aware of Margaret Cavendish while working on a project exploring audience response to robot performance, because another research group was working with Dr. Liza Blake. He holds a BA in Theatre and Linguistics from the University of Toronto, and an MA in Classical Acting from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA). His recent research has focused on doing historical sociolinguistic analysis using eighteenth-century drama. Find out more about his acting at his website.