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It's a perennial source of frustration to Jane Austen's admirers that so little is known about her quiet existence as an unmarried woman seeking an outlet for her ferocious intelligence in genteel, rural England at the turn of the 19th century. Carol Shields, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Stone Diaries, has already proved herself a writer who can convey large truths with an economical amount of material, which makes her an excellent choice as Austen's biographer. Shields's brief but cogent text makes persuasive connections between Austen's novels and her life (the plethora of unsatisfactory mothers, for example, and the obvious sympathy for women barred from marriage by poverty and from careers by social custom), but she never forgets that fiction expresses first and foremost an artist's response to the world around her, not actual personal history. In fact, Shields argues, it may well have been Austen's sense that the novels she loved to read didn't provide a very accurate picture of the society she knew that fired her own work. Her merciless portraits of the economic underpinnings of marriage and family relations are in many ways more "realistic" than male writers' dramas of battle or females' fantasies of romantic bliss. As for her life's lack of incident, its one major disruption--her parents' move to Bath--prompted a nine-year silence from their formerly prolific daughter. Shields gleans as much as she can from Austen's letters, while remembering that they too gave voice to a persona, not the whole truth, in order to delineate a quirky, sometimes cranky, sometimes catty woman who was by no means the perfect maiden lady her surviving relatives sought to immortalize. An Austen biography will never be as much fun as an Austen novel, but Shields does a remarkably entertaining job of discerning the links between the two. --Wendy Smith
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Penguin's wonderful series of "lives," biographies unique in their manageable length and careful pairing of subjects with authors who are themselves important creative figures, delights once again, this time with a pithy literary biography of Jane Austen by Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer Shields (The Stone Diaries; Dressing Up for the Carnival etc.). With frankness, warmth and grace, Shields writes of an "opaque" subject who lived a short life and about whom very little is known beyond family letters. "Jane Austen belongs to the nearly unreachable past," Shields notes. There is no diary, no photograph, no voice recording of her; her life was filled with lengthy "silences," notably a nearly 10-year "bewildering" period starting in 1800, when Austen, unmarried and in her mid-20s, moved with her family from rural Stevenson to the more urban Bath. This period also "drives a wedge between her first three major novels and her final three: Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion" and suggests Austen's "reconciliation to the life she had been handed... in a day when to be married was the only form of independence." Shields is especially interested in the sisterly relations between Jane and the "subsuming," older Cassandra, as "each sister's life invaded the other, canceling out parts of the knowable self." The insularity evident in their letters to each other reveals something puzzling about Austen herself. She is relatively provincial and inexperienced in matters both social and sexual, yet conveys a "trenchant, knowing glance" throughout her novels. Shields seems to conclude that of the two sets of writings--the private letters and the published novels--the novels themselves offer the greater insight into Austen's artful imagination and shrewdly judgmental character. (Feb. 19)Forecast: Recent film versions of Austen's novels have revived public interest in this classic writer. With Shield's high-profile name also on the cover, sales should be strong and steady
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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First Sentence
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1996 my daughter, the writer Anne Giardini, and I travelled to Richmond, Virginia, to present a joint paper at the Jane Austen Society of North America, an organization that comprises some of the world's most respected Austen scholars, as well as rank amateurs, like ourselves. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1996 my daughter, the writer Anne Giardini, and I travelled to Richmond, Virginia, to present a joint paper at the Jane Austen Society of North America, an organization that comprises some of the world's most respected Austen scholars, as well as rank amateurs, like ourselves. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Carol Shield's my hero again,
This review is from: Jane Austen: A Life (Paperback)
Carol Shields, one of my favourite contemporary authors, wrote a bio of Jane Austen, one of my favourite classic authors. What a find! Her book about Jane Austen is exquisite. She also inserts her own understanding of an author's struggle. My only disappointment was the fact I finished the short book far too soon!
2.0 out of 5 stars
What kind of biography is this ?!?,
By
This review is from: Jane Austen: A Life (Paperback)
This is the first "biography" I've read on Jane Austen but it is not not the first time I read somebody's biography. In general, I notice that biographies are subdued in subjective tone because they try to be objective so that they present the information the best it can so that we, the readers, can pass our own judgement. In this book, however, it is not the case.I like that the author cross-references information between Jane's novels and Jane's life even though it is not how biographies are typically written. But I dislike author's personal remarks on how Jane was, what type of relationship she had with certain people, how she could have felt in certain situations,etc... it feels as if she is trying to reinforce her view than letting you make up your own mind. I think what annoys the most is that the book is presented as biography which is not and that I wasted my money on this. Don't get me wrong. It is an interesting read but it should not have been falsely classified as biography ( 50% is biographical and the rest belongs to personal reflection and criticism). It is more of the author's reflection on life and times of Jane Austen, Carol Shields' view of Jane Austen so to speak.
4.0 out of 5 stars
a biography for the novel-reader,
By erica "ejs192" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Jane Austen (Hardcover)
This biography is an enjoyable read for the lover of Jane Austen novels. Written by an accomplished novelist, it sidesteps the droning tone and monotonous succession of facts that characterize most biographies. Instead, its short chapters tell a story that is both interesting in its own right and a worthwhile companion to a study of Jane Austen's literature.As a serious biography, however, this account seems to fall short. It's light on facts (partly due to the unrecorded nature of much of Jane Austen's life - still, there's little in the way of factual information that couldn't be summarized in a magazine article) and its information is not well-documented. There are certainly more thorough, factual accounts. Moreover, what Shields' book lacks in hard facts it makes up for in conjecture, the kind of soft-sided narrative that makes for interesting reading but spongy research material. Still, to Jane Austen fans looking for context, this is a suitable resource. It's written with an eye to her novels and their interaction with her life as well as the emotional and practical trappings of authorship. It gives readers insight into the atmosphere of her life, the people she knew and the places she lived, what her days were like. It's interesting and well-written, and short, and sweet.
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