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    Green Darkness
    Green Darkness
    Green Darkness
    Audiobook23 hours

    Green Darkness

    Written by Anya Seton

    Narrated by Heather Wilds

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Green Darkness is the story of a great love, a love in which mysticism, suspense, and mystery form a web of good and evil forces that stretches from Tudor England to the England of the twentieth century.

    The marriage of the Englishman Richard Marsdon and his young American wife, Celia, slowly turns tragic as Richard withdraws into himself and Celia suffers a debilitating emotional breakdown. A wise mystic realizes that Celia can escape her past only by reliving it. She journeys back four hundred years to her former life as the servant girl Celia de Bohun during the reign of Edward VI-and to her doomed love affair with the chaplain Stephen Marsdon. Although Celia and Stephen can't escape the horrifying consequences of their love, fate (and time) offer them another chance for redemption.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateNov 11, 2014
    ISBN9781494575854
    Green Darkness
    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 Green Darkness

    4/5

    23 ratings15 reviews

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    • 5/5
      eerie, weird, and wonderful
    • 5/5
      Beautifully told tale of medieval love, honor, and duty and the ways in which we imprison ourselves. Storytelling at its best!
    • 3/5
      This is my first book I have read by Anya Seton.I began the book and got to Part 2 and decided it was not for me so decided to read the last chapter. I then thought it sounded interesting and read the whole book and the last chapter again. Actually, reading the last chapter first worked best for me. The novel has the main characters, Sir Richard Marsdon of England and his American wife, Lady Celia Marsdon. The periods of time are the 1960s and also the 16th century. Celia goes back into time; a book that somewhat deals with reincarnation. There is history, mystery, romance, hate and Tutor England.It was not a page turner for me but got better about half-way through the book. I thought there were too many characters and too much happening.It is a fairly well written book and interesting; the history is what I personally like. Reading the book does make me want to do some research on some of the characters. It is a book that I could read a second time when I have time.Leona
    • 3/5
      Green Darkness is an odd kind of book. In the preface, Seton informs the reader that she has written a book about reincarnation. She apparently was raised by two believers in the doctrine and set out to incorporate this theme in her book. This was, in my opinion, a mistake. Fortunately for you, dear readers, if you skip Parts 1 and 3 (set in the early 1970’s) the 475 pages of story that is left turns out to be pretty good Tudor-era historical fiction. (I encourage you to ignore the bits of reincarnation piffle that leak through on occasion – it will take nothing away from your enjoyment of the story.) The story focuses on Celia deBohun, a teenaged girl from the wrong side of the blanket and her pursuit of the Roman Catholic monk, Stephen Marsdon. Celia’s aunt, Lady Ursula Southwell, a dependent of the RC noble, Sir Anthony Browne of Cowdray Castle, takes Celia in and determines to raise her, as best she is able, as a lady. Ursula hopes that one day she might make a good match for Celia – the best that can be achieved considering how very poor Urusula is and Celia’s bastard state. She even makes an arrangement with the house priest – Stephen – to educate the girl as much as can be done and to instruct her in the Catholic religion as Celia knows virtually nothing about religion of any kind. Big mistake.Swirling around the characters is the extremely unstable political condition of England at the time. No one – Protestant or Roman Catholic – has an easy time of things. Everyone is forced into a balancing act, depending upon which one of the three Tudor siblings – Edward, Mary or Elizabeth - is in control at any particular time. Those members of the nobility who cannot bring themselves to switch from one religion to another have a harder time of it than the others. The ordinary people are confused by the constant shifting back and forth in religion and many end up not knowing what to think, including Celia, who having come late to religion, eventually decides she needs no religion at all and will, instead, just follow the form of whatever seems expedient at the time. She has a bigger fish to land. With the single-mindedness of the young, she pursues Stephen relentlessly. Stephen, it must be said, does not really do all he should to protect himself from her, but after several years of trying to shake Celia off, he probably just got tired. He is, underneath it all, a man and she is very persistent. Seton provides Part 2 with a dark ending – a really dreadful one – and she should have left it there, but having afflicted us with Part 1 she really had to wind up that part of the story. I only read Part 3, because I’d read Part 1. It wasn’t good. If and when I read this book again I’ll go straight to Part 2. It was worth the read – the other parts were not.Three and half stars for Part 2One and half stars for Parts 1 & 3.
    • 5/5
      I read this book when I was young . 20 I think. I am 50 now . It still has the same power , My Father told me about this book. It was at the top of his favorites list. Classic til this day. Treat yourself. It’s a nice getaway.
    • 4/5
      Fantastic Historical fiction. Intrigue, Characters, What a Twist!
    • 3/5
      This book started off very slow and confusing. Once the plot moved to Tudor England, things got better. The thing that always wins me over with Anya Seton is that she is very adept at bringing you into the world she is writing about. She describes things in a way that makes you smell, taste, and hear the world of the story's setting. Overall this book had high points of interest and a few dull spots. If you have the patience to see it through, you will be rewarded.
    • 4/5
      I read this book back in the seventies and was delighted to find it again. Seton is an amazing historian and is able to recount stories in great detail and from different angles. Reincarnation historical romances remind us that there is nothing new under the sun. There is heartbreak, betrayal, and just plain old bad timing in every age. In Green Darkness, religious intolerance was the catalyst for most political intrigues and both Protestant and Catholic used their "one true faith" to gain control and power over the masses. A person's religion saturated everything in their lives for good or ill.The love story of Celia and Brother Stephen was an interesting way to show the contrast between the sacred and the secular. Like religion in that time, there was ultimately no way to bring the two together in any meaningful way and it ended up destroying them both. It was quite brilliantly done and has many valid lessons for our time.
    • 4/5
      Personally I didn't like this book nearly as much as the previous Seton books I've read (Katherine and Winthrop Woman).This story starts out in modern 20th century -- turns out the characters are reincarnations of characters in early Tudor England. A monk has an affair with a servant girl.
    • 3/5
      I read this book years ago and decided to do a reread and enjoyed it just as much. Although this is a historical novel it is also a novel about reincarnation.Back Cover Blurb:Celia de Bohun first fell in love in 1552. But Stephen was a priest. When he returned her love, the young sweethearts became the victims of their savage times....Centuries later, their tragedy threatens the life and happiness of another Celia, the young, rich and unhappy wife of Richard Marsdon and lady of the Sussex manor called Medfield Place.Only by piercing the green darkness of the past and revealing its mysterious truth can Celia be saved.
    • 4/5
      I found this book sitting all by itself on a table at a library book sale. It was the last day of the sale and everything had been quite picked over except for this gem. Needless to say I grabbed it right away.

      Thank goodness for the Mt. TBR Challenge which prompted me to read those books which have been on my shelves the longest. This being one.

      The novel is divided into three parts and begins during what feels like the 1970's. Celia and Richard Marsdon are a wealthy young couple recently married and living in the Marsdon family home. One evening Celia falls into a trance-like state and we find out that she is revisiting her past life in the 1500's. Her past life involves a tragic love and ending which must be resolved in order for her present to be free.

      I loved this middle section and thought it was really well done. The reign of Edward the VI and his subsequent death felt really well researched and that shows in the writing. Seton explores the idea of reincarnation and atonement in an interesting way that is believable and not gimmicky.

      Another winner from Seton.
    • 4/5
      I didn't like this book as much as Katherine. The reincarnation aspect was too abrupt for me, even though the middle Tudor section was very well done. I feel this novel could have served much better as ordinary historical fiction without the reincarnation; Part 2 would have been very good solo, with all the references to the modern day eliminated.On the other hand, I've been spoiled by Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn, which was excellently done, so bearing that in mind I do think this novel is worth a try, if only for that middle section.
    • 5/5
      I read this when it was first published and was blown away. One of the few books that I was unable to finish without a lump in my throat and tears hindering me from reading the last pages.
    • 3/5
      Rating: 3 stars out of five, but only because I still love the memoryThe Book Report: The book description says:This unforgettable story of undying love combines mysticism, suspense, mystery, and romance into a web of good and evil that stretches from 16th-century England to the present day. Richard Marsdon marries a young American woman named Celia, brings her to live at his English estate, and all seems to be going well. But now Richard has become withdrawn, and Celia is constantly haunted by a vague dread. When she suffers a breakdown and wavers between life and death, a wise doctor realizes that only by forcing Celia to relive her past can he enable her to escape her illness. Celia travels back 400 years in time to her past life as a beautiful but doomed servant. Through her eyes, we see the England of the Tudors, torn by religious strife, and experience all the pageantry, lustiness, and cruelty of the age. As in other historical romance titles by this author, the past comes alive in this flamboyant classic novel. My Review: My sister used to have a book store. She, our mother, and I all spent the summer of 1973, damn near 40 years ago now, reading this book. We'd been stealing it back and forth from each other until finally she gave Mama and me our own copies so she could read it in peace. We did a sort of group read on the book, and oh my heck how we liked it! I was a teenager then. I wasn't an inexperienced reader, but I was completely suckered in by anything to do with reincarnation. Mama was just getting the Jeebus infection that ate her sense of humor, compassion, and decency...all oddly enough while sexually abusing her teenaged son, funny how often religion masks corruption...and my sister was in one of the periodic hellish patches that have punctuated her road through life.We all resonated with the travails of the characters, trying to work out their manifold interconnections and karmic debts. The book's very Gothicness was deeply appealing to each of us for our own reasons, and gave us hours and hours of fun things to talk about. For that, a whole star in grateful memory.Rereading this at fifty-two was probably a mistake. The writing is very much what one would expect of an historical novelist whose career began in the 1940s. She was renowned in the day for her meticulous research, and yet says in her Preface (p. vi of the 1973 Houghton Mifflin hardcover I got from the liberry), “Source books make for tedious listing, but for the Tudor period {of Green Darkness} I have tried to consult all the pertinent ones.” Imagine someone, even a novelist, trying to get away with that now! There would be calumnious mutterings and sulphrous aspersions cast on the character and the ability of such an author. As if it matters in a work of fiction.The humid Gothic atmosphere of lust and love denied, the surrendered to, then disastrously brought to a close, was a little hard on my older self. I like romantic stories just fine, but the moralizing you can keep. And there is a deal of moralizing! Whee dawggie! The gay characters are ugly...as within, so without, and Seton clearly has the attitude of her day towards gay men...the lusty lower-class wenches get their bastards and get turned out, the Catholic Church and its hypocrisy suffer agonies at the hands of the vile Protestant politicians...Seton was raised a Theosophist...good people turn hard and cold when given property to protect...the Exotic Hindu Doctor who understands Modern Medicine but Knows How to Be In Touch With the Spirits, oof!...oh, the lot!So not so much on the attitude. I get it, and in those days I absorbed it because it was the way my family thought, but how I wish I could go back to 1973 and smack this book out of my young hands! Along with Stranger in a Strange Land, its misogyny and homophobia leached right into my brain and lodged there. Never made me one whit less gay, just made me feel terrible about it, like the culture's messages continue to do to young and impressionable kids to this day.But the fact that the lady wrote this, her next-to-last book, when she was nearing seventy and had only just been divorced from her husband of nigh on forty years, and was beginning her long decline into ill health, makes Green Darkness a poignant re-read for me. Her life was unraveling, and mine was too (what little there was of it at that point); I think both my mother and my sister felt the same way. I suspect some resonance of that bound all of us to this book and spoke to each of us about its unhappy people in unhappy lives. There is, in the best romantic tradition, a happy ending. But I for one have never believed it.
    • 5/5
      The best book ever!!!