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The Walpole Chronicles

My Religion

In 1926 the London Daily Express commissioned and published a collection of sixteen essays on religion by well-known people (mostly authors) including Hugh Walpole. Listen to Hugh’s thoughts on his spiritual life in this audiobook reading of his full essay.

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Audiobook, Books, Magazines, Religion

My Religious Experience

Hugh Walpole contributed to a series of short booklets published in 1928, edited by Dr. Percy Dearmer, of King’s College, London, in which Hugh Walpole writes a deeply intimate autobiographical insight into his his thoughts and feelings towards spirituality and how his faith was formed.

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Audiobook, Religion

Jeremy At Crale

This 1927 work is the third and final in Walpole’s Jeremy series.  Jeremy’s home is in Polchester, a fictional English cathedral town in Walpole’s imagination. In this book Jeremy goes to boarding school.

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Audiobook

The Captives

A story of young woman’s alienation from the society which holds one captive, whose life is suddenly disrupted, by a stumbling progression through constrained social cliques and frustrated romantic attachments, haunted by religious shadows.

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Audiobook

The Green Mirror

Three generations of the Trenchard family live together in comfortable domesticity until Katherine, the favourite daughter, meets and falls in love with Philip, back from some years in Russia, and the whole stability of the family is threatened.

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Audiobook

The Gods And Mr Perrin

Perrin and Traill are masters at a grim old-fashioned second-rate boarding public school in Cornwall – Perrin has been there many years and the youthful Traill has just arrived. Antagonism grows between the two turns into active dislike following an unfortunate incident which eventually has devastating consequences.

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Audiobook

The Duchess Of Wrexe

Rachel, a spirited young girl, has to choose between Francis Breton, her difficult cousin who has been disowned by the family, and Roddy Seddon, a conventional and rather boring but wealthy young man.

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Audiobook

Harmer John

Hjalmar Johanson is a boyish unworldly Swedish body builder who comes to Walpole’s fictional cathedral town of Polchester. He has a vision of transforming the town and its populace to a healthier and more beautiful state.

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Audiobook

The Cathedral

The story of an arrogant 19th-century archdeacon in conflict with other clergy and laity was certain to bring comparisons with Trollope’s Barchester Towers (The Manchester Guardian ’s review was headed “Polchester Towers”), but unlike the earlier work, The Cathedral is wholly uncomic….

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Audiobook

The Golden Scarecrow

The Golden Scarecrow, in nine chapters, presents nine stories of nine children, united by location, more or less. A tenth story of a tenth life, divided into Prologue and Epilogue, provides a different sort of unity.

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Audiobook

Jeremy

The story of Jeremy and his two sisters, Helen and Mary Cole, who grow up in Polchester, a quiet English Cathedral town. There is the Jampot, who is the nurse ; Hamlet, the stray dog ; Uncle Samuel, who paints pictures and is altogether ‘queer’; of course, Mr. and Mrs. Cole, and Aunt Amy. 

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Audiobook

Jeremy & Hamlet

Hamlet is Jeremy’s dog. This 1923 book is Hugh Walpole’s second volume in his Jeremy semi-autobiographical trilogy (Jeremy and Jeremy at Crale being the others) about a 10 year old boy. It’s the story of Jeremy and his two sisters, Helen and Mary Cole, who grow up in Polchester, a quiet English Cathedral town.

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Audiobook

Joseph Conrad

Written by Hugh Walpole, this is the literary biography of Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924) who is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English literary history.

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Audiobook

The Old Ladies

The Old Ladies (1924) is a study of a timid elderly spinster exploited and eventually frightened to death by a predatory widow.

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Audiobook

The Prelude To Adventure

Olva Dune is a Cambridge undergraduate who commits a murder and at that moment feels the presence of God. In a tour de force Walpole novelizes the Francis Thompson poem The Hound of Heaven, about a fearful soul pursued by an insistently loving God. 

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Audiobook

The Secret City

Written in the first person, The Secret City is a novel in three parts of a journey through post World War I Russia and the Revolution, during a period of Civil War and economic collapse. Listen to the audiobook

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Audiobook

The Wooden Horse

Walpole’s first novel (1909), The Wooden Horse is the story of the Trojans, a family which accepted tranquilly the belief that they were the people for whom the world was created.

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Audiobook
Portrait of a man with red hair - hugh walpole book

Portrait Of A Man With Red Hair

Portrait Of A Man With Red Hair is a romantic macabre, a thriller of a melodrama written in 1925 and dedicated to his good friends Ethel and Arthur Fowler with whom he stayed with on many occasions whilst he was on his literary tours of America.

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Audiobook, Books, Plays

A Little Piece Of Heaven On Catbells…

In 1926 Hugh Walpole made the Lake District his home, finding his ‘Cottage and a Cow’ in Brackenburn, Manesty Park, Keswick. He described his home as “a little piece of heaven on Catbells”…