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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

希尔兹是奥斯丁的忠实读者，她坦言她偏爱爱玛（Emma）一角，然而作为奥斯丁研究学者和传记作者，她始终比较克制小说迷的狂热冲动可能对严谨的传记写作造成的偏执影响。对于史料匮乏的人生段落，比如奥斯丁二十五岁至三十五岁那段几乎搁笔的时光，希尔兹还是做了合乎情理的设想与尝试，然而她也直言在巨大的沉默面前，“我们的一切所知都纯属揣测”。希尔兹的诚恳，以及她与奥斯丁的共鸣，使得这部小传既有冷静的分析，又有温和的暖意。

希尔兹这样写道：“传记作家的传统做法，是把简•奥斯丁生平的既定事实拼凑在一起，诸如她的生日、她的旅行、她的兴趣以及她的死亡。然后再从小说中拼凑出一些推论，裹在摇晃欲坠的骨架上。这种做法，相当于洗劫作者的衣柜抽屉，翻出一堆叠得整整齐齐的手帕或是破旧的手套，以此为根据得出结论。这样，他们就作出假设，认为小说直接来源于作者的亲身经历而非她的想象。例如，奥斯丁小说中一连串闹心的家庭，就被想当然地看作是作者自己混乱家庭的写照。看了小说之后，人们轻而易举地就能想象到奥斯丁家族内部激烈的姐妹之争，甚至还能想象到大人孩子雨天被困在家里而积累起来的小小摩擦。但是，如果用“失灵”一词来形容奥斯丁一家，就会产生一个类似的难题，即现代观念和术语被看成是不受时间限制的。其实不然，这些现代观念和术语是有时间限制的。18世纪晚期人们的思维与我们今天的思维轨迹不同。我就曾经试图以我自己的心理阻抗（现代精神分析用语）来解读简•奥斯丁短暂的一生，而不是去小说中寻找肯定或否定的答案。”