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    Dragonwyck
    Dragonwyck
    Dragonwyck
    Audiobook16 hours

    Dragonwyck

    Written by Anya Seton

    Narrated by Hillary Huber

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In the spring of 1844, the Wells family receives a letter from a distant relative, the wealthy landowner Nicholas Van Ryn. He has invited one of their daughters for an extended visit at his Hudson Valley estate, Dragonwyck.


    Eighteen-year-old Miranda, bored with her local suitors and commonplace life on the farm, leaps at the chance for escape. She immediately falls under the spell of the master and his mansion, mesmerized by the Gothic towers, flowering gardens, and luxurious lifestyle-unaware of the dark, terrible secrets that await.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 19, 2015
    ISBN9781494583019
    Dragonwyck
    Author

    Anya Seton

    ANYA SETON (1904–1990) was the author of many best-selling historical novels, including Katherine, Avalon, Dragonwyck, Devil Water, and Foxfire. She lived in Greenwich, Connecticut.

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    Reviews for Dragonwyck

    3.5/5

    174 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Miranda Wells is too dainty and flighty to fit in with her hard working, puritanical farming family. When a distant cousin invites her to act as companion to his young daughter, she leaps at the chance and soon arrives at the beautiful gothic mansion of Dragonwyck. It is ruled by the autocratic Nicholas Van Ryn, who is so handsome, powerful, cultured that Miranda falls for him immediately. Nicholas is haunted by his first wife, who cannot give him the son he craves, and by Miranda's beauty. After Johanna dies, he immediately proposes to Miranda. And it is here that the story takes a turn, because far from a meeting of minds or a storybook ending, Miranda's triumphant wedding rapidly becomes a nightmare.

      This is like a wonderfully dark and twisted version of Jane Eyre or Rebecca, in which the remote older gentleman the heroine falls in love with is actually a terrifying villain. And yet, he is still as powerful and handsome as ever, and he's still quite attractive to the heroine, which makes the story all the more horrifying. Miranda is no Jane Eyre--she is silly, selfish, and bends to Nicholas's every whim. But she is an engrossing main character, perhaps in part because she is so unlike the smarter, wiser, less shallow heroines of better novels. I was rooting for her to get what she wanted from the very first. Miranda has to change in order to find happiness with the true hero of the book (the selfless Dr. Jeff Turner), but I never felt like this was a morality tale*.


      *Actually, there is one very annoying bit: after her husband brutalizes her body and spirit for years, Miranda finally breaks free of him but nearly dies in the effort. She recovers, but her shining golden hair is shaven off during her fever, and she has unobtrusive brown hair ever after. I've seen this trope before, and it's bullshit every time.
    • 3/5
      I liked this book enough to finish it but not more. The descriptions of the setting were evocative and enjoyable. The sketches of the minor characters were witty and perceptive, though the frequent jumps in point-of-view that sketched these characters were off-putting. Unfortunately, the major characters and relationships fell flat for me. The only character I liked at any point was Nicholas, and as his character deteriorated, no one else filled his place. Even at the end, when he was fully the villain, I still cared more about him than about the sketchily drawn hero and heroine whose only good traits were the wholesomeness, rejection of materialism, and willingness to work that were supposed to win my loyalty simply because I was told of them. Miranda's entire character arc was to move from dreamy hopefulness to pragmatic usefulness, and that message is too simplistic and moralistic for me to enjoy it. Miranda's obsessive fascination with Nicholas is the only convincing relationship in the book. His interest in her, her friendship with her maid, and her eventual relationship with Jeff are unconvincing. The setting, the premise, and Nicholas had great potential that kept me reading, but the book didn't live up to its potential.
    • 5/5
      I kept the lights on till 3 in the morning to finish Dragonwyck by Anya Seton. This novel felt like a delightful guilty pleasure. To set the tone, it opens on the famous poem by Edgar Allan Poe, Alone: From childhood's hour I have not beenAs others were; I have not seenAs others saw; I could not bringMy passions from a common spring.From the same source I have not takenMy sorrow; I could not awakenMy heart to joy at the same tone;And all I loved, I loved alone.Then- in my childhood, in the dawnOf a most stormy life- was drawnFrom every depth of good and illThe mystery which binds me still:From the torrent, or the fountain,From the red cliff of the mountain,From the sun that round me rolledIn its autumn tint of gold,From the lightning in the skyAs it passed me flying by,From the thunder and the storm,And the cloud that took the form(When the rest of Heaven was blue)Of a demon in my view. This is an unabashedly romantic, creepy story set in the 1840s with overblown characters who are almost parodies of themselves, including a Byronic male anti-hero in the form of Nicholas Van Ryn; a male paragon of dark good looks with disconcertingly piercing cerulean eyes, and descendant of a long line of immensely wealthy Dutch landowners, who is the current 'patroon' of a large tract of land along the Hudson river and the developing city of New York. Nicholas, the archetypal control freak, fully occupies the role of domineering master and self-contained enigma who keeps all around him in a state of fear and dread of his ever shifting moods. The innocent and unsophisticated Miranda is the submissive heroine who falls into her distant cousin Nicholas' clutches when he invites the young maiden to Dragonwyck manor with a view to form the erstwhile farm girl into a proper society lady. She leaves her strictly devout father and hardworking mother and siblings to their small farm and poverty to fully embrace the kind of lifestyle she has so far only read about in novels. She eagerly takes to the life of splendour and luxury in the capacity of nanny to Nicholas' little girl and falls under his spell the moment she meets him, unable to resist his physical beauty combined with irreproachable courtly manner, but there is also the not small matter of keeping the good favour of his wife, the morbidly obese Joanna who insists on treating the girl like a servant. There are of course macabre secrets contained in this vast gothic mansion, though (tiny spoiler, which any observing reader will have figured out early on:) Nicholas himself is the novel's dangerous enigma. Some of the core events which provide the framework for the novel are based on historical facts, such as the anti-rent wars, the Astor Place massacre and a a great steamboat race closely modelled on a competition undertook by Cornelius Vanderbilt and his eponymous steamship. My edition (Chicago Review Press, 2005) contains an afterword by Philippa Gregory, who claims Seton probably didn't realize how strongly influenced by Jane Eyre she was in this, her second novel, but I beg to differ. Surely it can't be an accident that her heroine—just as innocent and meek as Jane Eyre—, comes to live in a great gothic house complete with what may be a haunted Red Room and a repulsive first wife in the capacity of governess. There are other parallels with Charlotte Brontë's novel I cannot mention without revealing spoilers, but while I don't mean to imply Dragonwyck is in the order of masterpieces such as Jane Eyre is, it definitely makes for a good helping of chills and frissons, delivering a hearty dose of unabashedly Gothic horror and romance (not to mention a visit to Edgar Allan Poe and his dying wife's impoverished household). For all these reasons, I count this novel among the most entertaining I've read this year.