Which Little Women recording should you buy?
The complete readings of Little Women that we list run 19 hrs 2 mins to 21 hrs. Around them are abridgements, some of them long, and an Audible Original with Laura Dern in its cast. Some editions of the novel hold only its first part, so a runtime well short of the complete readings here is worth a second look.
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Short answer
Barbara Caruso: complete and solo. Christina Ricci (the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) and Laurel Lefkow are complete too, and the complete readings in the table run 19 hrs 2 mins to 21 hrs. The abridgements are the trap here, because one of them is long: Lorelei King's recording is marked abridged at a length that could pass for a whole book. Jean Smart's and Elizabeth McGovern's are shorter. The Audible Original with Laura Dern is a cast production; we have not read its description, so we cannot tell you how much of the novel it covers. And the second part of the story was long published in Britain as a separate book, Good Wives, so a listing far shorter than the complete readings here may hold only the first part; check before you buy.
The recordings, compared
| Narrator | Length | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Barbara Caruso Our pick | 19 hrs 37 mins | Unabridged | Complete and solo. |
| Christina Ricci | 19 hrs 2 mins | Unabridged | Complete and solo, the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition. |
| Laurel Lefkow | 21 hrs | Unabridged | Complete and solo. |
| Laura Dern, Emily Bauer, Lauren Fortgang, Allison Hiroto, Carly Robins, Suzanne Toren | 12 hrs 15 mins | Audible Original, full cast | An Audible Original with a cast, which its description calls a dramatisation: a performed version, not a reading of the text. |
| Lorelei King | 8 hrs 5 mins | Abridged | ABRIDGED, at 42% of the shortest complete reading here: long enough to be mistaken for a whole book. |
| Jean Smart | 2 hrs 32 mins | Abridged | Abridged. |
| Elizabeth McGovern | 1 hr 5 mins | Abridged | Abridged, from the Famous Fiction series, and short. |