Jane Austen
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- CHF 2.50
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- CHF 2.50
Descrizione dell’editore
Bestselling, award-winning novelist writing about one of the most popular and enduring English novelists - recently voted best author of all time.
'Splendid ... a gem' LITERARY REVIEW
'An excellent biography' MAIL ON SUNDAY
'Shields on Austen offers up a delicious prospect. And we are not disappointed' SCOTSMAN
Jane Austen was one of the world's most remarkable writers, whose characters are as alive today as they were two hundred years ago. Despite being one of the most perceptive writers about people and relationships, she never married and always lived with her parents and sister Cassandra.
Perhaps unusual for women at that time, Jane Austen was acutely aware of the larger political and social world around her, but chose to focus her novels on the family as a microcosm through which to explore human nature.
The prizewinning novelist Carol Shields gives us a beautifully written, perceptive look at the life of one of the finest and most popular English novelists of all time.
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.
