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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.7
EAN num: 9780143035169
ISBN number: 0143035169
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 192
Printing Date: May 31, 2005
Publishing house: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Sale Popularity Level: 69427
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
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Product Description:
With the same sensitivity and artfulness that are the trademarks of her award-winning novels, Carol Shields 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 Steventown 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.
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 very 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. --Wendy Smith
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Rated by buyers 
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Carol Shields' 2005 "Jane Austen: A Life" is a short read at under two hundred pages, but her economical writing style packs an intriguing biography of Jane Austen into those few pages. Shields examines the limited biographical material on Austen from the perspective of a successful fellow writer. Her narrative tracks in parallel the known events of Austen's life and the composition of her novels. Inevitably, Shields must fill in the limited record with informed speculation; the result is an enjoyable and thought-provoking book.
Shields finds that Jane Austen, like many writers, depended on continuity and security in her personal routine to enable her creative skills. Shields thus explains the decline in literary output beginning with the move of Jane's parents to the city of Bath from her childhood home and ending only when Jane and her sister and mother finally settled into Chawton House nine years later.
Shields delves into Jane's family relationships, suggesting that her relationship with her mother was an awkward one. Shields also puts more shades of nuance into Jane's intense relationship with her sister Cassandra than is found in most biographies. We tend to see Cassandra now as an appendage to Jane's story, but Shields suggests the reverse may have been true for much of Jane's life.
Contrary to the family biographies, Shields finds that Jane Austen knew much disappointment in her life. She was unlucky in love. She failed to marry, and never had her own home and family. Her failure to marry also doomed her to a life of genteel poverty as an adult, and an unhappy status as a poor relation within her extended family. Validation of her writing skills in the form of publication came late. The result, Shields surmises, was a woman who was sometimes bitter, feelings not entirely masked by the ferocious weeding of her correspondence at her death.
Shields provides brief but insightful commentary on the men who had a romantic interest in Jane Austen, including Tom LeFroy, Samuel Blackall, and Harris Bigg-Wither. She is frankly skeptical of the story told by Jane's sister Cassandra about a seaside romance with an unnamed young man in either 1801 or 1802.
Shields' narrative notes Jane's evolving writing skills throughout her life. Her status as an innovator in the genre of the novel, still new in Jane's day, is documented, as is her ability to artfully capture some truths about the world in which she lived and so acutely observed.
"Jane Austen: A Life" is very highly recommended to fans of Jane Austen as a short but fascinating read from the point of view of another author.
Rated by buyers 
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Jane Austen: A Life by Carol Shields is a brief yet comprehensive biography of Jane Austen's life. It is written in a simple and engaging style which few readers will find any difficulty in reading. Not unfamiliar with Jane Austen, I occasionally found myself in slight disagreement with some of the author's conclusions, but overall, I was surprised and pleased by the quantity of information presented in such a clear and concise manner. Carol Shields touches on the major events of Jane Austen's life and uses these events to shed a little light on each of Jane Austen's novels as well as her minor works and some of her juvenilia. I would recommend Jane Austen: A Life by Carol Shields to anyone looking for a non-intimidating introductory biography about Jane Austen.
Rated by buyers -
I decided to read Carol Shields' biography "Jane Austen" for two reasons: first, because I knew about and admired the biographer; and second, because I hoped that reading a biography about Jane Austen would help me better comprehend and appreciate her novels. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy reading Jane Austen. I am just not as crazy about her as many bright, highly educated women I know. When I heard that Carol Shields, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Stone Diaries" had written a highly acclaimed biography of Austen, I jumped at the chance to reeducate myself.
In the beginning Shields asks many questions. "How does art emerge? How does art come from common clay, in this case a vicar's self-educated daughter, all but buried in rural Hampshire? Who was she really? And who exactly is her art designed to please? One person? Two or three? Or an immense, wide, and unknown audience that buzzes with an altered frequency through changing generations, its impact subtly augmented in the light of newly evolved tastes and values?" (p. 5-6) Throughout the biography, Shields does an amazingly delightful and scholarly job of exploring these themes. In the end, she states: "What is known of Jane Austen's life will never be enough to account for the greatness of her novels, but the point of literary biography is to throw light on a writer's works, rather than combing the works to re-create the author." (p.175) Obviously, this was Shields' intent, and in this reviewer's estimation, she succeeds completely.
This biography was an absolute joy to read. It is short--under 200 pages. I read it in one sitting, never once feeling that the details overwhelmed. My interest never faded. Now, I find myself thinking about the many vivid characters in Austen's novels and wanting to read them again in a new light.
It has been over twenty years since I last read any of Austen's books, so detailed familiarity with her novels is not a prerequisite to understanding this biography or finding pleasure in its remarkable insights.
Shields is an extraordinary author in her own right. Her prose is clear, articulate, creative, often fun, and always on the mark. It is clear that she has a keen appreciation for Jane Austen's literary style and a deep desire to understand the woman who created these magical works or art. I am enthusiastic after reading this biography and recommend it highly to anyone who wants a better appreciation of Austen, her person, her period, and her novels.
Rated by buyers -
Carol Shields' excellent introduction to Jane Austen provides wonderful insight into Jane Austen's life and novels -- and the relationship between them. Notable topics include marriage, family relationships, treatament of "current events", character analysis for the Austen heroines, and several insightful sections regarding Austen's men. One very interesting idea posed was to what extent Austen's life (or any author's) informs and shapes the novels, or how much she kept the two separate, or in fact created an "ideal" life, one she never quite realized. The book covers all of this and more, eloquently, and in less than 200 pages. Shields' love of Austen is evident on every page. Discussions of this nature necessarily contain "spoilers" -- if you haven't read Austen's novels, and want to be surprised, read the novels first, then come back to the biographies. You will finish this particular biography satisfied AND hungry for more, starting with another reading of Austen's novels. The list of sources provides an excellent resource for additional reading on Austen's life. Bravo.
Rated by buyers -
Carol Shields has an easy writing style and obviously adores her subject, making this biography a very pleasant read. We get a brief overview of her life, education and living conditions. I was a little disappointed that there was not more (more about her writing habit and more about her relationships with friends and family) - and was a little irritated by the many assumptions made ("she must have felt ..."). Doing a little research later I discovered that there is in fact very little information about Jane Austen.
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