Tragedy makes Jane Austen more relatable than ever in this concluding installment.
Jane Austen struggles under the burden of loss in the final volume of Hemingway’s (The Marriage of Miss Jane Austen: Volume II, 2016, etc.) trilogy.
In the first two installments, Hemingway reimagined the author Jane Austen as a young mother and wife, filling in the missing years of her historical record. Jane has adapted to marriage and the running of a household and acquired wealth and pregnancy; now, she’s exhausted. Her new son, George, requires her complete attention, and her relationship with her husband, Ashton, is at an all-time low. George also suffers from seizures, which triggers difficult conversations about inherited conditions on Jane’s side of the family. When tragedy strikes, Jane flees to that family, seeking refuge from her marriage and her sorrow. Her profound anger and sadness are incredibly moving, as Hemingway offers a more humanized version of Jane Austen than readers may be used to. She’s not the mysterious and gifted writer they know but a mother and wife haunted by loss, desperately seeking a path forward. Ironically, it’s death that finally brings Jane back to life and allows a reconciliation with Ashton. Determined to stay with him this time, Jane joins her husband and the British Army, who set sail for Spain to fight Napoleon Bonaparte’s forces. As the couple encounters new places and old enemies (the Lovelaces, last seen in the previous installment, reappear here to Jane and Ashton’s detriment), they’re continually faced with the terrible cost of war. After a long physical and emotional journey, Hemingway leaves us with Jane the writer, who takes back her voice after losing so much in her life. Although sorrow sweeps through much of this story, Hemingway’s thoughtful, well-written book also offers an incredibly moving portrayal of a young woman confronting love and loss. The narrative also touches on the political, technological, and cultural changes of the early 19th century, but the most successful portions involve the evolution of Jane as a woman and a writer. In the end, she muses, “I cannot go on as if nothing has changed, but I can go on.”
Tragedy makes Jane Austen more relatable than ever in this concluding installment.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-979472-76-0
Page Count: 338
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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