A fine-grained study that shows us how to read between the lines to discover the remarkable woman who helped transform the...
Tracking the “shadowy, curiously colorless figure” of the revered novelist.
In her debut book, a fine-grained literary study, Kelly (Classics and English Literature/Univ. of Oxford) amply shows her deep research into some of the lesser-known elements of Austen’s life and work. The author’s close attention to the period’s history supports her assertion that her subject was a radical. Austen’s readers must remember that during her lifetime, England was at war with France and was essentially a totalitarian state; habeas corpus was suspended, and treason was redefined in the strictest and most frightening terms. At the time, Austen was one of the only novelists to consider current events in her work. She never resorted to grand heroes or wicked villains, dealing instead with society’s ills—not least of all women’s rights, which were nearly nonexistent. In Sense and Sensibility, Austen alludes to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and decries women’s reliance on the kindness of relatives to provide for them. Slavery, especially as dealt with in Mansfield Park, receives the full Austen treatment with quotations from abolitionist writers, subtle character names, and mind manipulation. However, slavery was not Austen’s only target. Also in Mansfield, the author attacks the Church of England for enclosures of common land, pluralism, and outright ownership of slaves. In both Emma and Pride and Prejudice, Austen challenges the then-strict societal norms, particularly regarding introductions. Elizabeth Bennett shows her radicalism, deciding things for herself and tolerating authority only as far as it suits her. In dissecting Austen’s feelings on parents, especially fathers, sexuality, and 19th-century life, Kelly exposes a depth beyond what at first may seem to be silly characters.
A fine-grained study that shows us how to read between the lines to discover the remarkable woman who helped transform the novel from trash to an absolute art form.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3210-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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