Jane Austen (Penguin Lives) - Hardcover

Shields, Carol Diggory

3.69

4,334 ratings by Goodreads

9780670894888: Jane Austen (Penguin Lives)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670894885 ISBN 13: 9780670894888

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2001

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The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Stone Diaries focuses on the life and fiction of Jane Austen in a critical biography of the reclusive author of Pride and Prejudice and other great novels. 22,500 first printing.

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Review:

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

About the Author:

Carol Diggory-Shields is the author of many works for children including the poetry booksLunch Money, Almost Late to School, andAfter the Bell Rings. She currently works as a childrens librarian and previously worked with children as a recreational therapist. She lives in northern California.

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