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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 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

From Publishers Weekly

Penguin's wonderful series of "lives," biographies unique in their manageable length and careful pairing of subjects with authors who are themselves important creative figures, delights once again, this time with a pithy literary biography of Jane Austen by Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer Shields (The Stone Diaries; Dressing Up for the Carnival etc.). With frankness, warmth and grace, Shields writes of an "opaque" subject who lived a short life and about whom very little is known beyond family letters. "Jane Austen belongs to the nearly unreachable past," Shields notes. There is no diary, no photograph, no voice recording of her; her life was filled with lengthy "silences," notably a nearly 10-year "bewildering" period starting in 1800, when Austen, unmarried and in her mid-20s, moved with her family from rural Stevenson to the more urban Bath. This period also "drives a wedge between her first three major novels and her final three: Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion" and suggests Austen's "reconciliation to the life she had been handed... in a day when to be married was the only form of independence." Shields is especially interested in the sisterly relations between Jane and the "subsuming," older Cassandra, as "each sister's life invaded the other, canceling out parts of the knowable self." The insularity evident in their letters to each other reveals something puzzling about Austen herself. She is relatively provincial and inexperienced in matters both social and sexual, yet conveys a "trenchant, knowing glance" throughout her novels. Shields seems to conclude that of the two sets of writings--the private letters and the published novels--the novels themselves offer the greater insight into Austen's artful imagination and shrewdly judgmental character. (Feb. 19)Forecast: Recent film versions of Austen's novels have revived public interest in this classic writer. With Shield's high-profile name also on the cover, sales should be strong and steady

希爾茲是奧斯丁的忠實讀者，她坦言她偏愛愛瑪（Emma）一角，然而作為奧斯丁研究學者和傳記作者，她始終比較剋製小說迷的狂熱衝動可能對嚴謹的傳記寫作造成的偏執影響。對於史料匱乏的人生段落，比如奧斯丁二十五歲至三十五歲那段幾乎擱筆的時光，希爾茲還是做瞭閤乎情理的設想與嘗試，然而她也直言在巨大的沉默麵前，“我們的一切所知都純屬揣測”。希爾茲的誠懇，以及她與奧斯丁的共鳴，使得這部小傳既有冷靜的分析，又有溫和的暖意。

希爾茲這樣寫道：“傳記作傢的傳統做法，是把簡•奧斯丁生平的既定事實拼湊在一起，諸如她的生日、她的旅行、她的興趣以及她的死亡。然後再從小說中拼湊齣一些推論，裹在搖晃欲墜的骨架上。這種做法，相當於洗劫作者的衣櫃抽屜，翻齣一堆疊得整整齊齊的手帕或是破舊的手套，以此為根據得齣結論。這樣，他們就作齣假設，認為小說直接來源於作者的親身經曆而非她的想象。例如，奧斯丁小說中一連串鬧心的傢庭，就被想當然地看作是作者自己混亂傢庭的寫照。看瞭小說之後，人們輕而易舉地就能想象到奧斯丁傢族內部激烈的姐妹之爭，甚至還能想象到大人孩子雨天被睏在傢裏而積纍起來的小小摩擦。但是，如果用“失靈”一詞來形容奧斯丁一傢，就會産生一個類似的難題，即現代觀念和術語被看成是不受時間限製的。其實不然，這些現代觀念和術語是有時間限製的。18世紀晚期人們的思維與我們今天的思維軌跡不同。我就曾經試圖以我自己的心理阻抗（現代精神分析用語）來解讀簡•奧斯丁短暫的一生，而不是去小說中尋找肯定或否定的答案。”