Joan Makes History
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
In this rollicking, irreverent tour de force, Kate Grenville rewrites the familiar past.
Joan is a woman of no great distinction, but in the life of her imagination she is in the front line of events, cheerfully altering history.
Joan Makes History was first published in 1988 and was funded by the Australian Bicentennial Authority to celebrate 200 years of history.
Kate Grenville is an award-winning novelist with a distinctively witty style.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The brilliant Australian author of the award-winning Lillian's Story achieves something utterly original and moving in this fanciful feminist epic. Male readers need not cringe, however: Joan (who appeared briefly in Lillian's Story ) may be thoroughly unconventional, yearning for a more striking role in life, but her sympathies embrace all of humankind, and the portrait of her good but unimaginative husband Duncan is profoundly moving and perceptive. Chapters from Joan's own life are interspersed with imagined moments in Australian history in which Joan plays a role: as Captain Cook's proud wife in the discovery of the continent, as a female convict first to set foot in Botany Bay, as an Aboriginal woman, as dozens of unsung, hardworking and invisible women who toiled skeptically alongside the men who starred in, and wrote, the history books. Funny and sometimes piercingly poignant, Grenville offers an unblinking and unsentimental view of life's underside; her book is an often poetic treasure.
Customer Reviews
A Joan for all times
This book is clever, inscrutable, sad, funny, and any other adjective you can imagine. I am sorry it has a finish. I am having a better life for having read it. Thank you Kate Grenville. You are indeed extraordinary.