The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter

The Continuing Adventures of Judith Shakespeare

De: Grace Tiffany

Narrado por: Mary Jane Wells

"Witty, resilient, and fiercely intelligent, Judith emerges as a heroine for the ages. Her journey, rich in historical authenticity and imaginative storytelling, offers insights that resonate across the centuries."—Christina Baker Kline, New York Times bestselling author of The Exiles

For listeners of Hilary Mantel and Madeline Miller, a deeply engrossing work of historical fiction—a tale of a woman of the Shakespeare family struggling to manage both her private grief and public danger.

At the age of sixty-one, Judith Shakespeare, a midwife-apothecary and twin of the long-dead Hamnet, must flee provincial Stratford on horseback to avoid arrest for witchcraft. Her traveling companions are a zealous Puritan woman and child who have been displaced by civil war—the bloody seventeenth-century strife between Royalists and Roundheads. Judith is also leaving her marriage, which has foundered since the wrenching loss of two adult sons to the plague.

The sequel to the author’s My Father Had a Daughter, a tale of Judith in her youth, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter revisits this character for the ages—Shakespeare’s sharp-tongued, witty youngest child, no less feisty in her maturity. Four-hundred years after Judith’s death, Grace Tiffany brings her back onto center stage. Judith’s latest tale offers profound insights—into friendship, motherhood, marriage, religious extremism, and war—which remain resoundingly true today.

This work is narrated in Original Pronunciation, that is, Early Modern English, as a nod to the phonological system of Shakespeare’s time.

©2025 Grace Tiffany (P)2025 HarperAudio

Very good well performed story

I loved this story of a skilled aging midwife and healer who also was one of Shakespeare s daughters as she is ( at first unwillingly but fleeing charges of witchcraft) drawn into adventure and travel to London in a rapidly changing period of English history. The historical detail is well researched and her character and those of the others she travels with are quirky and. believable. The entire story is read well and performed in a version of Early Modern English with what sounded to my (American) ears like a credible ( but understandable) accent for the part of England and class she was meant to come from. Highly recommend this one!