With the same sensitivity and artfullness
that are the trademarks of her award-winning novels, Carol
Shields here explores the life of a writer whose own novels
have engaged and delighted readers for the past two hundred
years.
With its fascinating insights into
the writing process, this magnificent biography of Jane
Austen is also a compelling meditation on how great fiction
is created.
Jane Austen is part of the
Penguin Lives series.
Jane Austen
reviewed by Pamela Nutt
This is one of a series of biographies
whose subjects range from St Augustine to Andy Warhol,
from Mozart to Marlon Brando. This volume on the life
of Jane Austen is written by Carol Shields, a novelist
shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993 and winner of
the Pulitzer Prize.
As biographies go, this one is
a slim volume (154 pages.) The advantage of this is that
it can be read at a very few sittings, or at a single
sitting on a self-indulgent day. The expected disadvantage
(that it will skim over material dealt with more fully
and satisfactorily in a range of recent biographies of
Austen) is not the dominant impression gained in reading
Shields' account of Austen and her work. This is largely
because this work is very consciously the reflections
of one writer on the life and work of another. Shields'
response is shaped by the fact that she is one of 'those
who interest themselves in the creative art'. She feels
the anger Austen directs to the publisher Crosby and Co
as they neglected to publish Susan/Northanger Abbey. It
is an 'outrage (which) can be understood by any contemporary
writer who has been treated in a disrespectful way by
a publisher'.
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[Austen] is a mystery, one that Shields explores
with the patience and empathy of a devoted fan."
- The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution
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...[a] delicate analysis of Austen's life and artistry...
"
- Boston Globe
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Jane Austen
reviewed by Cindy MacKenzie, Books in Canada
Consistently praised for his "inspired
pairing of author and subject" James Atlas, editor of
the acclaimed Penguin Lives Series, made one of his best
matches when he paired Carol Shields with Jane Austen.
For, reminiscent of her predecessor, Shields has been
"lauded for her keen eye on the nuances of women's lives"
prompting Atlas himself to exclaim, "She is our Jane Austen!"
Atlas began his monumental project with the intention
of modifying the genre of biography in order to address
some of what he considers to be its inherent problems,
specifically its traditionally cumbersome length as well
as the distortion of factual information that each biographer
inevitably brings with his or her highly subjective interpretation.
These changes have resulted in the production of slim
"biographies crafted more like novels, blending the style
of fiction with the substance of fact." As the author
of the Pulitzer-prize winning novel, The Stone Diaries,
Shields has also raised questions about the genre of biography,
asking "What is the sum of life? Even when we tell our
own life stories, we make alterations, we imagine ourselves
through the gaps." Her exploration of the genre in that
novel takes the form of what can be called a fictional
biography, a "mock biography" of Daisy Goodwill Flett
that leaves the reader convinced of the reality of the
author's fictional creation. Thus the genre can work both
ways, for what Shields aims to record in fiction and in
biography is "the genuine arc of a human life," wisely
acknowledging the interactive qualities of each genre
in that "biography is subject to warps and gaps and gasps
of admiration or condemnation, but fiction respects the
human trajectory."
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Carol Shields' lens is firmly trained on Jane Austen
and her family and novels..."
-Los Angeles
Times
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Jane Austen
reviewed by Wendy Smith, amazon.com
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.
Winner
Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction 2002