Rating: 
Summary: Great Bio
Review: A very readable new biography of Jane Austen. Knowledge about Austen's life combined with insights into her books made it quite enjoyable. Perfect length, also.
Rating:
Summary: Great Bio
Review: A very readable new biography of Jane Austen. Knowledge about Austen's life combined with insights into her books made it quite enjoyable. Perfect length, also.
Rating:
Summary: Nice to meet you Ms. Austen
Review: At the begining of this biography, Carol Shields warns us that not enought documents and recollections remain to paint a realistic picture of Jane Austen. Ms. Shields employs her acute sense of empaphy-- gloriously exhibited in "The Stone Diaries"-- to imagine the author behind "Emma" and "Sense and Sensibility". There is no way to confirm the veracity of Ms. Shields meditation, but it doesn't matter. If the "Jane Austen" exhibited, in this enthralling member of the Penguin-Lipper "Lives" series, is a character who is purely Carol Shields' creation, she is fascinating: ironic, observant, and razor sharp. In most books from the "Lives" series, the reader acquires not only an appretiation of the subject matter, but becomes familiar with the personality, open-minded analysis, and ethusiasm of the author. Carol Shields is a terrific guide through Jane Austen's sensibilities and accomplishments.
Rating: 
Summary: Literary criticism and biography in one
Review: Carol Shields has deftly woven together literary analysis with biography in her reconstruction of the life and times of Jane Austen. Unfortunately I am not familiar enough with her books to fully appreciate this book. A true fan of Austen's works will enjoy this book a great deal I'm sure.
Rating:
Summary: A New Portrait of Jane Austen.
Review: Carol Shields has written a wonderful biographical essay in the old style. It is careful, imaginative, honest and brave. Apparently, an impartial, ungrudging affection and respect for its subject prompted the urge to learn more and, fortunately for us, she tells us what she has learned. Like the best of anything human, its little flaws serve to authenticate and are to be cherished, rather than challenged, because the book as a whole is so well written that at times it is evocative of the work of Jane Austen herself. Its presentation is modest but its effect is powerful. This biography is free of the modern practice of earnestly re-presenting every (usually already well known) fact of a subject's life as if new, supposedly in the name of scholarship. This technique usually results in almost nothing being learned about the subject as an individual, as any personal statement might be interpreted as "impressionistic". Impressions as carefully considered as Carol Shields' are here are something to be proud of. She has used facts to support her ideas rather than the other way around, so we end up with something like a new portrait of her subject, sketched carefully from both the facts and the cogent insights of the author. In the first chapter, the author quotes George Gissing, who suggested that, "the only good biographies are to be found in novels", and suggests this is because, "fiction respects the human trajectory". Jane Austen, raised on the wryly honest literature of the 18th century, certainly might have agreed, and while Carol Shields has not written a work of fiction, she has written a book that anybody who cares about Jane Austen must read if they want to know her better.
Rating:
Summary: Jane Austen, Pure and Simple
Review: Carole Shields' brief biography for the Penguin series is on two grounds a noteworthy achievement. Not only is it immensely readable, but its necessary speculations, never vulgar or demeaning, are strikingly insightful. Austen, after all, left no diary or memoir, and her life, owing to her sister Cassandra's vigilance in destroying letters, is filled with enough small gaps outside of one lengthy silent period to vex any inquisitive biographer. Shields overcomes these difficulties both to her own credit as well as to that of her great subject.
Rating:
Summary: sort of tone deaf
Review: I found this useful for its biographical information, but I knew nothing of Austen's life going in, so it's very possible that there are better biographies on the market. At any rate, I was constantly frustrated by Shield's take on the novels. Emerson once famously complained that Austen writes only marriage novels. Shields, in effect, responds that the novels aren't just about marriage. Rather, they're also about the conditions of women -- in particular, women of the lesser gentry -- at the turn of the 19th century, and the manner in which marriage is their only means of escape from the drudgery of their prosaic lives. For what it's worth, this idea -- Austen is great because she holds a mirror up to the real conditions of women at the time -- threatens to make Austen look like the Edith Wharton of the early 19th century. What makes Austen great (and Wharton merely very good) is the fact that there's so much more to Austen's novels. Unfortunately, Shields doesn't take anything save Austen's "social commentary" (such as it is) into account. In particular, she completely misses the exceptional depth of Austen's attention to moral psychology. Shields at one point refers to Gilbert Ryle's (unfortunately neglected) study of Austen's novels. My sense is that this book suffers from it's author's failure to appreciate Ryle's main point. Anyone really interested in a sensitive account of what makes Austen's novels so great would be much better served by reading Ryle's essay and leaving this book to one side.
Rating: 
Summary: Not the best biographical work.
Review: I hate to be the odd reviewer out, but I was not as impressed with this work on the life of Jane Austen. Not being familiar with the Penguin Lives series, I thought this would be a biography. After reading the book, I am not sure I would use that classification here.
As mentioned in other reviews, this book is readable. Also, there are some flaws in the text (possibly editing error). My fault lies more in the research given to the topice. In the introduction, Shields mentions that she is a writer, but paints herself as more of an amateur enthusiast. There is nothing wrong with this, but if I am reading about the life of Jane Austen, I want to know that the author has researched it (and yes, this is a daunting task).
Here bibliography mentions bibliographies and biographies she has read about Austen. In the text, she mentions letters, but doesn't always quote from them. Where did these letters come from? Knowing this would add some authenticity to the book. Some of her quotes, like a poem written by a brother, don't always seem the best choice. In this case, the poem doesn't always give me the best insight to Jane Austen that one of the other letters may have. If a surviving letter has some insight, I would like to see a quote from that letter.
A lot of the research for the book seems to have come from the novels themselves. The idea seems to be that Jane Austen wrote this because experience "x" was happening in her life. This is conjecture, hard to confirm due to the lack of letters surviving, but conjecture nonetheless.
Any biography you read on Jane Austen will have a sizable bit of guesswork to it. Without seeing the material that Shields is drawing from, that bit seems to be bigger than I like to think.
I would recommend this to someone introducing themselves to the work of Jane Austen. For the literary student, I would probably give this one a miss. I don't regret reading it, but knowing what I know now, I probably would have read one of the other biographies.
Rating:
Summary: The best first, and perhaps only biography of Jane Austen
Review: I've read about seven biographies of Jane Austen, and this would be the one that I recommend that anyone read first. It pretty much sums up all that is really known about Austen's life and avoids the usual hazards of wild speculation and dubious reinterpretation. It does not desperately attempt to break new ground but considers the presentation of a solid, readable account of the subject's life as sufficient grounds for its existence. This is not to say that I accept everything that Shields says, but she does a commendable job.
There is one serious problem with this biography but I believe that it is the decision of the publisher, not the author. There is almost nothing in the way of documentation: bibliographies, sources, notes. I do like this the books that I have read in this series as a good introduction to the various people covered, and as far as I can tell, they are reliable, but one has to trust Penquin's reputation. They are not scholarly.
I would recommend that the reader next consider David Cecil's Portrait of Jane Austen as a look at the author in context of her time. The interested reader should also realize that there are a variety of "specialty" books that focus on houses and places she lived in or visited.
As for the other biographies that I have read by Tomalin, Nokes, Park, etc., one can get a lot of additional detail about the life of a typical woman of Austen's class, as well as trivia such as the weather around the time of her birth (Make no mistake, I LOVE such details) but the books are weighted down with pretentiousness, unfounded speculation, doubtful agendas and side interests of the authors. By all means, I recommend them to people with an intense interest in Jane Austen, but not for the person who just wants context for her writings.
Rating:
Summary: Ms. Austen I Presume...
Review: Jane Austen novels bring comfort. As full of issues as they are, there is a comfort in finding oneself immersed in the Romantic era, when securing a "situation" - if you were a woman, that is - was full-time work. Likewise, there is a comfort in reading about Jane Austen's life and work, especially when the author of such an exploration is Carol Shields, a writer who has a good idea of what the novel of manners is all about. Shields opens her work with a brief prologue describing a Jane Austen conference she attended in 1996 in Richmond, Virginia, with her daughter. The pair gave a joint paper on "the politics of the glance" in Austen novels. The preface is useful in clearly establishing Shields' sincere interest in her subject, which nicely frames the somewhat informal work that follows. I use the word informal because Shields writes a fastidious account of Austen's life but quotes no sources and offers no bibliography. Such a treatment is acceptable for the reader interested in gleaning a little more of Austen's life and work. For more demanding readers, there is a credibility issue: surely Shields didn't pull all of her conclusions from memory. Having said this, the account is meant to be largely interpretive. Shields offers her own lively responses to each novel, its characters and its issues, and attempts to tie the works with Austen's personal life. In some instances, these parallels are obvious: for example, the search for husbands for Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility mirrors her own and sister Cassandra's search. Other times, though, the parallel is lost: Pride and Prejudice, seen by many as Austen's "sunniest" novel, actually mirrors one of the unhappiest periods in her young life. In the end, Shields' analyses are both useful to the Austen scholar and a good introduction for the general reader, giving this volume a kind of easy appeal.
|
