Overview

Dead Men Telling Tales is an original account of the lasting cultural impact made by the autobiographies of Napoleonic soldiers over the course of the nineteenth century. Focusing on nearly three hundred military memoirs published by British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese veterans of the Peninsular War (1808-1814), Matilda Greig charts the histories of these books over the course of a hundred years, around Europe and the Atlantic. Drawing on extensive archival research in multiple languages, she challenges assumptions made by historians about the reliability of these soldiers' direct eyewitness accounts, revealing the personal and political motives of the authors and uncovering the large cast of characters, from family members to publishers, editors, and translators, involved in production behind the scenes. By including literature from Spain and Portugal, Greig also provides a missing link in current studies of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, showing how the genre of military memoirs developed differently in south-western Europe and led to starkly opposing national narratives of the same war. Her findings tell the history of a publishing phenomenon which gripped readers of all ages across the world in the nineteenth century, made significant profits for those involved, and was fundamental in defining the modern soldier's tale.

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Matilda Greig is a research associate at Cardiff University, working on the AHRC-funded project Strange Meetings: Enemy Encounters 1800-2020, and has previously held research and teaching posts at University College Dublin and Sciences Po. She completed her PhD at the European University Institute in Florence in 2018, and holds an MA from Leiden University and a BA from the University of Cambridge. Matilda writes about the cultural history of war, particularly soldiers' memoirs and popular material culture, and specializes in modern European and Atlantic history. Her work has been published in History Workshop Journal, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Hypotheses. Originally from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in Northeast England, audiobook narrator Pearl Hewitt currently lives with her husband and two children in Houston, Texas. Over the years she has worked as a customer service rep, a teaching assistant, and a teacher, but deep down there was always a performer wanting to get out. In 2007 her twelve-year-old son told her that he believed she was so good at reading stories out loud that she should do that as a job. That was her defining, eureka! moment, and she's never looked back. Pearl discovered the world of voice-overs and pursued a career in voice acting. She attended workshops, training seminars, and conferences, and began volunteering as the resident mystery and suspense narrator for Houston Sight-Into-Sound Radio, where her work earned numerous IAAIS awards for narration and production. In 2012 Pearl decided to focus on audiobooks, and her professional career blossomed while working directly with authors and narrating for a number of major publishers. Pearl's voice is perfectly suited to British Regency romance and cozy murder mysteries, but her personal favorites are the classics, especially children's literature.

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