Jane Austen, Carol Shields
Jane Austen, Carol Shields
List: $15.00 | Sale: $10.50
Club: $7.50

Jane Austen

Author: Carol Shields

Narrator: Donada Peters

Unabridged: 5 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/29/2001


Synopsis

With the same sensitivity and artfulness that are the trademarks of her award-winning novels, Shields here explores the life of a writer whose own novels have delighted readers for the past 200 years. In Jane Austen, Shields follows this superb novelist from her early family life in Steventon 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 a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, Carol Shields's magnificent biography of Jane Austen is also a compelling meditation on how great fiction is created.

"This tightly written biography brings Austen to life in a way rarely seen. Here she is the living, breathing woman not the prim literary classic. Outstanding job."—Booklist

About The Author

Carol Shields (1935–2003) is the author of The Stone Diaries, which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Canada's Governor General's Award. Her other novels and short story collections include The Republic of Love, Happenstance, and Swann. Shields’s work has been translated into 33 languages.Donada Peters, an award-winning actress, has narrated more than 500 titles since the 1980s, and is an acclaimed “Golden Voice” of audiobook recording. A transplanted Brit, she lives in California and, when not behind the microphone, works on stage, film, and TV. She has an unerring ear for various British and European accents and is often called upon to perform specific types of accents.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Karen on March 02, 2008

I enjoyed this slim biography of Jane Austen. Shields does not manufacture a mysterious past for her, but instead focuses on Austen as a writer. It's a less romantic, but more realistic and respectful approach than movies like "Becoming Jane." She theorizes that Austen's novels are about a search for......more

Goodreads review by Tammy on April 25, 2018

An interesting short bio and an enjoyable read! Though little is known about Jane Austen, Carol Shields followed up possible circumstances behind Jane’s writing and theories of what influenced the speculations surrounding her life. I found it curious the author referred to sister Cassandra as having......more

Goodreads review by Gary on September 08, 2016

I was drawn to Carol Shields' Jane Austin: A Life because I admire Shields' work as a novelist and because I am in the clutches of a severe attack of Austenitis. It hits me annually, sometimes accompanied by a far less pleasurable bout of gout. Thankfully the gout went away, but the Austen fever lin......more