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Summary
Summary
"In her fictional biography, The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields created an astonishing portrait of Daisy Goodwill Flett, a modern woman struggling to understand her place in her own life. With the same sensitivity and artfulness that are the trade-marks of her award-winning novels, Shields here explores the life of a writer whose own novels have engaged and delighted readers for the past two hundred years." "In Jane Austen, Shields follows this superb and beloved novelist from her early family life in Steventon to her later years in Bath, her broken engagement, and her intense relationship with her sister Cassandra. She reveals both the very private woman and the acclaimed author behind the enduring classics Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. With its fascinating insights into the writing process from an award-winning novelist, Carol Shields's magnificent biography of Jane Austen is also a compelling meditation on how great fiction is created."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author Notes
Carol Shields is a writer and critic who was born on June 2, 1935 in Chicago and grew up in Illinois. Shields resided in Canada, where she was the Chancellor of the University of Winnipeg, and a professor at the University of Manitoba.
Shields's first novel, Small Ceremonies, was published the week of her 40th birthday. Her other works of fiction include The Orange Fish, Larry's Party, Various Miracles, and The Stone Diaries, which received the Governor's General Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Shields has also been awarded the Canadian Bookseller's Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the CBC Prize for Drama. She died on July 16, 2003.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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 writingsÄthe private letters and the published novelsÄthe 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 (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
While many are familiar with Jane Austen's novels, the details of her life are less well known. In this addition to the Penguin Lives series, biographer Shields draws from Austen's witty letters and classic novels to combat the notion that Austen lived a placid, uneventful life. Raised in a large family by intelligent parents, Austen's creativity flourished. She and her siblings were known to put on plays, and she found a ready audience for her fiction in her family. Her writing developed from outrageously witty and satirical juvenilia to a subtle and graceful maturity in her novels. Meanwhile, Austen's life was anything but dull; balls, parties, broken or tragically ended engagements, and family scandals occupied Jane and sister Cassandra's time. Shields explores popular Austen stories, such as her attraction to and subsequent separation from an eligible bachelor and her 24-hour engagement to a different man. Although Shields suggests that Austen's unmarried state might have been a source of disappointment for her, Shields also shows how important Austen's literary successes were to her. A thoughtful introduction to an important and influential writer. --Kristine Huntley
Guardian Review
Carol Shields describes Lady Susan , Jane Austen's first attempt at novel-writing, as "charmless. And very nearly pointless". The same, alas, might be said for this book, Shields's first attempt at biography. Unless, that is, you want to make a case for there being a giddy sort of charm in her literary criticism: there is "no mention of toes in any of [Jane Austen's] work, though there are a few fingers. Nor are there any hips, thighs, shins, buttocks, kidneys, intestines, wombs or navels." Shields is an award-winning novelist, and she approaches Jane Austen as one writer to another. She identifies with the agonising wait to hear from publishers and with the pain of being told by a squirming reader that your new book is "extremely interesting". However, it is rather the contrast than the comparisons between the cool, nimble 19th-century novelist and her lumpen biographer that strikes one. For all their bonding, Shields seems ill-equipped to write a life of Jane Austen; she gives us instead a garrulous essay in which empathy replaces thought, speculation replaces substance and repetition tries to replace research. The finished product is a baffling confusion of contradictions and random ideas. Literary biography, Shields argues, should "throw light on a writer's works, rather than combing the works to recreate the author". This moot point, casually made at the end of the book, bears no relation to what the reader has just been struggling with. Not having anything new to say about Jane Austen - Claire Tomalin and David Nokes having both published rather fine biographies recently - Shields opts instead to compare the novels thematically with the events and characters in Jane Austen's life. This process of weighing and measuring is occasionally interrupted as Shields reminds us that, actually, Austen wasn't an autobiographical writer at all. For example, not only do her "heroines live in fictional places", but there can nowhere be found in any of the novels the story of her sister Cassandra's fiance dying of yellow fever, or of her aunt's being imprisoned for stealing a piece of lace. Good point, so why do we then have so many "analyses" along the lines of "Elinor and Marianne [are] like the Austen sisters, without money and each of them longing for marriage"? Or "in Jane Austen's novels daughters grow up and very often become their parents' advisers. In her own family this did not happen"? Even the absence of "a great deal of love for children in Jane Austen's work" is reduced to the author's being "often saddled with the care of her nephews and nieces". The only remarkable achievement of Shields's book is to make Jane Austen's imaginative powers seem as inert and limited as her domestic life, and the novels seem smaller than they once were. Nowhere is there presented a plausible case for seeing life and literature as mirroring one another in so straight- forward a way. Mirroring often distorts rather than reflects, and it is striking to find an accomplished novelist being so unquestioning about the relationship between the self one is and the self who writes. Henry James dramatised this tension perfectly in his story "The Private Life", in which a celebrated writer (based on the poet Robert Browning) is busy boring his friends over dinner while his ghost is sitting upstairs, producing page after page of animated drama. The point is that these selves do not meet - that the part of us that writes is strange to us and a stranger to others. Unfortunately, on this occasion we seem to be stuck at a dinner party with the Carol Shields who writes biography rather than the skilled novelist, who is scribbling away elsewhere. As with any dull guest, opinion is presented as fact - "It is difficult to love Darcy" - and the banal is presented as perceptive: "Death, particularly the death of her father, must have affected her deeply." Perhaps aware that her audience is jaded rather than enlivened, Shields throws in a few cliched metaphors: "Just as [Jane Austen] walked behind a wall of shrubbery at Steventon, she wrote her novels behind a wall of isolation." During this period her brothers were engaged in combat at sea, while she, at home, "pen in hand, brought to the page the only kind of combat a woman was allowed: the conquest of hearts". By the time we get to her knowledge of Jane Austen's Bath, Shields seems to have become tipsy: "Today Mrs Thatcher comes here to relax; the Clintons have dropped in, and so have a number of film stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Demi Moore; there is no doubt that name- dropping was, and continues to be, part of fabled Bath." At the dinner party, one imagines, Shields's companions nervously clear their throats. Caption: article-austen.1 [Carol Shields] is an award-winning novelist, and she approaches [Jane Austen] as one writer to another. She identifies with the agonising wait to hear from publishers and with the pain of being told by a squirming reader that your new book is "extremely interesting". However, it is rather the contrast than the comparisons between the cool, nimble 19th-century novelist and her lumpen biographer that strikes one. For all their bonding, Shields seems ill-equipped to write a life of Jane Austen; she gives us instead a garrulous essay in which empathy replaces thought, speculation replaces substance and repetition tries to replace research. The finished product is a baffling confusion of contradictions and random ideas. Literary biography, Shields argues, should "throw light on a writer's works, rather than combing the works to recreate the author". This moot point, casually made at the end of the book, bears no relation to what the reader has just been struggling with. Not having anything new to say about Jane Austen - Claire Tomalin and David Nokes having both published rather fine biographies recently - Shields opts instead to compare the novels thematically with the events and characters in Jane Austen's life. This process of weighing and measuring is occasionally interrupted as Shields reminds us that, actually, Austen wasn't an autobiographical writer at all. - Frances Wilson.
Kirkus Review
An undistinguished addition to the list of recently published biographies of Jane Austen. In her attempt to examine the life of the ever-elusive Jane Austen, the novelist Shields (Dressing Up for the Carnival, p. 328, etc.) joins the ranks of well-known authors writing about other well-known individuals in the Penguin Lives series. The topic of Austen is well-traveled ground, of course, but Shields claims that her effort will be distinguished by her efforts to read what is implicit in Austens novels and history. The difficulty of reading what is implicit offers a pretty wide field for interpretation, and much of the writing here appears to be nothing more than hypothesis. The authors determination to turn to the novels as source material is understandable, since the task of any Austen biographer is bound to be a challenging one. Austen belongs to the nearly unreachable past: she left no formal portrait, no letters that were written before she reached 20, and she remained unknown in the literary sphere for most of her 42 years. Nevertheless, 160 of her letters survive (her beloved older sister, Cassandra, burned much of their correspondence after Janes death in an effort to protect her sisters memory), and very few are quoted by Shields. Instead, she runs through what well-known details there are of Austens life, moving more or less chronologically from her early years at the large family home in the countryside through her residence in Bath to her final years at Chawton Cottage. She makes what she can of Austens relationship with her close relations and friends, and she tries to imagine what Austens feelings might have been on the purchase and publication of her works. Reasons for Austens nine-year hiatus in the middle of her writing career are hazarded, but ultimately Shieldss guesswork feels no more insightful than any readers might be. Well-intentioned, but far from compelling.
Library Journal Review
Shields, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (The Stone Diaries) and devoted reader of Jane Austen, explores the family, private, and writing lives of the author of such beloved classics as Pride and Prejudice. Like Claire Tomalin (Jane Austen: A Life, LJ 1/98), she attempts to dispel the myth that Austen was oblivious to the world and its events. In chronicling her subject's life and personality, Shields emphasizes Austen's keen ability to listen, observe, and capture clearly the social mores of her time and explore human nature in her writing. Shields contends that historical references are behind many of the scenes and characters in Austen's novels, and as a way of more clearly personalizing Austen's experiences or feelings, she interjects commentary regarding writing and publishing that is presumably based on personal experience. These interjections tend to be a bit distracting but are fortunately brief and infrequent. This is a good introductory biography of Austen, but it lacks the interesting, intriguing, lively detail and scholarship of Tomalin's biography.ÄJeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
