What I’m Reading: Spence and Shields

Jun 252014
 

Read in February 2014

Becoming Jane Austen, by Jon Spence

Four stars

For serious fans of Miss Jane, Jon Spence’s biography is definitely a must-read. He takes a hard and thorough look at the people in her life, both contemporaries and ancestors, to find the inspiration for the themes and characters in her novels. While his best-known discovery concerns her relationship with Tom Lefroy, from which Hollywood — taking great liberties — spun out the film Becoming Jane, Spence finds precursors for just about every character and real-life examples of every theme in Austen’s circle of family, friends, and acquaintances. Some of his insights are marvelously novel, including his contention that Austen gave her own personality to Fitzwilliam Darcy and Lefroy’s personality to Lizzie Bennett. And his suggestion that near the end of her life Austen’s attention turned to adverse effects of women’s ceaseless childbearing leaves readers with yet another reason to regret the works left unwritten by her early death.

Jane Austen, by Carol Shields

Three stars

This brief biography offers an quick overview of Austen’s life and Shield’s interpretation that she and her heroines were searching for a home, something available only to married women of the day. Whether or not Shields is correct, for me her biography underscored the wretchedness of the lives of unmarried genteel women in those days, forever subject to the dictates of parents or brothers of where and how they would live. The book made me very sad for Miss Jane. With her lively intelligence and artistic ambition, the constraints of her lot in life must have been very difficult to bear as her decade-long silence when she was living in Bath clearly demonstrates.

What I’m Reading: Gilbert

Jun 252014
 

Read in February 2014

The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert

Two stars

Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things reads like a biography, not a novel, because it recounts one woman’s life rather than revolving around the resolution of a conflict. That is one of the difficulties this book may pose for some readers. To be a satisfying read, a life must focus on a character who is vivid and engaging, and I found Alma Whittaker lacking. She has some of the usual attributes of non-conventional heroines — she’s homely, she’s bright, she’s awkward, she’s outspoken, she pursues non-womanly subjects — but on another level this is a “poor little rich girl” tale. Alma’s father is the richest man in the western hemisphere, she wants for nothing, and when she chooses, she can go anywhere and do anything she likes. It’s hard to be engaged character who has no problems. And in some of her closest associations, Alma’s actions are those of someone supremely entitled, a big turnoff for me. When her parents adopt a girl whose mother was murdered by her father, Alma makes no effort to befriend her new sister, a breach that is unbridged for decades. When her husband fails to be the mate she’d imagined he would be, he’s banished. Had this life been edited into a novel, Alma’s marriage would likely have served as the central conflict, but we’re on page 196 before her future husband is even mentioned. And length is another problem with this book: At 512 pages it is simply too long. Several times I was on the verge of giving up on this novel, but I persevered, mostly due to the rave reviews from critics, yet by the end found nothing to justify those accolades.

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