The oval portrait (Edgar Allan Poe Collection nº 3)
Narrated by Cathy Dobson
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
Poe distills obsession and dread into a story so short it ends before you realize it got under your skin.
- Great if you want: classic Gothic atmosphere in a single sitting
- Listening experience: dense and unsettling — mood over plot, brevity over build
- Narration: Dobson brings measured, atmospheric pacing suited to Poe's cadence
- Skip if: you expect a full-length story — this is a fragment
Listen to The oval portrait (Edgar Allan Poe Collection nº 3) on Audible →
About This Audiobook
A wounded traveler takes shelter in an abandoned Apennine chateau and discovers, by candlelight, a portrait so lifelike it seems to breathe. The story behind the portrait, when he finds it written in a book, is one of Poe's most compressed explorations of art and obsession: a painter so consumed by capturing his wife's likeness that he fails to notice what the act of painting is costing her. In fewer than fifteen hundred words, Poe distills a meditation on the relationship between representation and life.
Cathy Dobson's narration treats the story's brevity as an asset rather than a limitation, giving each sentence its proper weight without padding. The Gothic atmosphere comes through cleanly in her delivery, and she handles the story-within-a-story structure, a narrator reading from a book about the portrait's history, with quiet clarity. This is an ideal audiobook entry for listeners new to Poe's short fiction.
