Carol Shields' Jane Austen

"I write only for fame and without any view of pecuniary emolument."

Jane Austen wrote that in a letter to her sister at the age of twenty, years before any of her novels were published, and Carol Shields assumes she was being ironic. Knowing Jane Austen as we do, Carol Shields is likely right. But sometimes things work out, and deserved merit turns ironic self-deprecation into truth.

Except she got a little emolument, too.

Certainly there is fame. Carol Shields cites a half dozen studies she consulted plus a half dozen earlier biographies in a brief bibliographic afterword. She also read the complete letters, plus all the surviving scraps of Jane Austen's juvenilia, aborted and/or uncompleted projects. All that was available. And that's just the briefest measure of Jane Austen's fame.

I haven't read any other biographies of Jane Austen, just an introduction or three. So I can't compare.  I think the large one by Claire Tomalin is recommended. This is short (under 200 pages) but I thought it was good. Certainly it told me a number of fascinating things about Jane Austen's life I hadn't known.

But I think the interesting thing about this is the interaction between two great writers, the idea of a writing life, and how that reflects back on Carol Shields. I don't think of Shields as particularly an Austenian writer; The Stone Diaries, for example, is brilliant, but more capacious than an Austen novel, and almost unbearably sad. (Though that said, Carol Shields thinks Austen more capacious, more involved with the world, than she's usually given credit for.) But it seems Shields was an Austen fan from the get-go; well, that shows good taste, doesn't it? It makes me want to read/reread Carol Shields with Jane Austen in mind.

The book is also very interesting on the elements of a writing life. For example:

The ability to sustain long works of fiction is at least partially dependent on establishing a delicate balance between solitude and interaction. Too much human noise during the writing of a novel distracts from the cleanliness of its overarching plan. Too little social interruption, on the other hand, distracts a writer's sense of reality and allows feeling to 'prey' on the consciousness...
     For every writer the degree of required social involvement or distance must be differently gauged, but novelists who take refuge in isolated log cabins tend to be a romantic minority, or perhaps a myth. Most novelists, knowing that ongoing work is fed by ongoing life, prize their telephones, their correspondence, and their daily rubbing up against family and friends.

Now, it's true, Carol Shields was writing before Twitter.

There is also a sadder reflection back on Carol Shields' life. Shields is quite sure that it was breast cancer Jane Austen died of, a diagnosis that's possible but remains uncertain. This is late in Shields' career, and I don't know if she had yet received the diagnosis of the breast cancer that was to kill her, or only feared it, because it occurred in her family as it seemed to do in Jane Austen's. But it was coming and Shields could easily be alive and writing today, but, sadly, is not.

Read for, as if one really needed another reason to read something so good:

AustenInAugust, now at Brona's Books.

And the 12th Annual Canadian Book challenge. Carol Shields was born in Chicago (well, Oak Park) but lived her adult life in Canada. Now who do I know like that?

Michael Innes' The New Sonia Wayward

Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive.

Michael Innes' The New Sonia Wayward (1960) could be read as demonstrating that old saw as being completely true.

Colonel Ffoliot Petticate (what a handle!) is sailing off the coast of England with his wife who is generally not known as Mrs. Ffoliot Petticate. No, she's Sonia Wayward, author of intellectually unsatisfying (at least to Petticate) but lucrative romances. And then she dies.

Her death is innocent enough. Colonel Petticate is an ex-Army doctor, and while he's no longer practicing, he's quite sure she's dead. An aneurysm or an embolism, he doesn't have the instruments and he's not sure about the cause. Oh, well. Their marriage was no longer anything more than friendly, and he hadn't really forgiven her for referring to him as 'quaint' when talking to one of her girlfriends.

But for reasons that are not particularly justified, he tips her body into the ocean and proceeds to try to appear as if his wife has just gone away. It will be convenient: he can write the next Sonia Wayward novel (the 'new Sonia Wayward') and keep cashing the checks.

Umm. Complications ensue...

Did his wife abandon him? (Embarrassing.) Did he kill his wife? (Criminal.) Who wrote the new Sonia Wayward? (Fraudulent.) There are some funny bits and Innes can be a successful farceur.

However, I just don't like it when, in a novel, suspense is generated because an otherwise smart person does something stupid, and this one is full of it. We're meant to like Petticate and think him of above average intelligence. Except he keeps failing to show it.

This one is helped along at the end with a couple of amusing, if improbable, coincidences, but the final solution was visible a mile away, I'm afraid. So, for me at least, not one of the better Michael Innes mysteries.

Vintage Mystery Challenge. Silver. Who. In/Retired From The Armed Services.

Which completes the Silver Age part of my challenge. I've got a couple to go on the Gold Age card.

The old saw, which I thought of when I'd barely started the novel, is actually Sir Walter Scott. I didn't know that...

Book Beginning: Joshua Ferris' To Rise Again At A Decent Hour

The mouth is a weird place. Not quite inside and not quite out, not skin and not organ, but something in between: dark, wet, admitting access to an interior most people would rather not contemplate--where cancer starts, where the heart is broken, where the soul might just fail to turn up. 

I encouraged my patients to floss.

...is the beginning of Joshua Ferris' To Rise Again At A Decent Hour. A couple of years ago I read Ferris' And Then We Came To The End, a Chicago novel, and liked it, so I had this one in mind when it came out and got good reviews. It was longlisted for the Man Booker and won the Dylan Thomas prize.

Sneaking in 'where the heart is broken' gives me a clue there's more going on here!

The blurb tells me that the narrator gets into some sort of identity theft trouble which causes him to rethink his life. I've only just started so I don't know much more. The only other dentist novel I know is Frank Norris' McTeague, which I read a long time ago, and is a terribly grim story. I'm hoping this is nothing like that. In any case our dentist narrator seems rather amusingly philosophical, which was not the case with McTeague the dentist.

Book Beginnings on Fridays is a bookish meme hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader. To play, quote the beginning of the book you're currently reading, give the author and title, and any thoughts if you like. And be sure to remember to floss!