Lucifer's Child

By: William Luce

Narrated by: Julie Harris

The spellbinding Julie Harris takes us on a magic carpet into the beautiful and haunting world of writer Isak Dinesen (pen name of Karen Blixen), romantic author and heroine of Out of Africa. Through her fanciful pact with Lucifer, Dinesen becomes a defiant spirit, an eccentric storytelling sorceress - passionate and wickedly witty.

Act I opens on New Year's Eve, 1958, as Karen Blixen prepares for a three-month visit to the United States. Addressing the audience as an unseen ghost, she weaves together stories of her fascinating, complex, and courageous life. In Act II, the writer has returned to Denmark and is dying - yet her life-affirming spirit continues to shine through the brilliant performance of Julie Harris.

©1989, 1991 William Luce (P)1993 by The Audio Partners Publishing Corp.

Critic reviews

"A magnificent life, a master actress, a masterpiece." (Cue magazine)
"Ms. Harris is electrifying!" (Rex Reed)

Excellent Recording of the Stage Play

I saw Julie Harris perform this one-woman show at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, almost 30 years ago, but I just discovered the audio version not long ago. y.

wonderful!

splendidly written and narrated. I could have listened for hours. one of my all time favorites.

I am Lucifer's Child!

What did you love best about Lucifer's Child?

I like the conversational format of the performance.

What did you like best about this story?

Julie Harris's performance, and it is a performance. Not just a reading.

What about Julie Harris’s performance did you like?

What's not to like? She puts so much feeling into her performance. You feel her pain and her sadness.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

There were several moments in the book that I particularly liked, but the ending was probably the most moving. The story is about a life winding down and I like to think that the character's final "vision" was also her final moment.

Any additional comments?

Because of Ms. Harris's performance, I bought Out of Africa which I also recommend.

Nifty little tale...

OK so it isn't Shakespeare but what is now a-days...
A bit dated but a good listen...

Beyond Out of Africa

Isak Dineson is one of the finest storytellers and prose stylists of the 20th century. Like Joseph Conrad, she was not a native English speaker, and that hint of distance in the foreign adds to the perfection of tone. This stage performance loses a half step with the lost visual dimension, but is a must for lovers of her spirit and her art. Julie Harris is of course a fine actress, and made something of a sideline channelling Dunedin here and in narrating many of the books. One wonders if even Meryl Streep could do it better.