The year is 1846. In a cold parsonage on the gloomy Yorkshire moors, a family seems cursed with disaster. A mother and two children dead. A father sick, without fortune, and hardened by the loss of his two most beloved family members. A son destroyed by alcohol and opiates. And three strong, intelligent young women, reduced to poverty and spinsterhood, with nothing to save them from their fate. Nothing, that is, except their remarkable literary talent.
So unfolds the story of the Bronte sisters. At its centre are Charlotte and the writing of Jane Eyre. Delicately unraveling the connections between one of fiction's most indelible heroines and the remarkable woman who created her, Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre will appeal to fans of historical fiction and, of course, the millions of readers who adore Jane Eyre.
Sheila Kohler was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She currently teaches at Princeton University. Becoming Jane Eyre is her 10th book. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, O Magazine and included in the Best American Short Stories. She has twice won an O'Henry Prize, as well as an Open Fiction Award, a Willa Cather Prize, and a Smart Family Foundation Prize. Her novel Cracks was nominated for an Impac Award.
Title: Becoming Jane Eyre
Author: Kohler, Sheila
ISBN: 9781849010863
Binding:
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Publication Date: 2011-08-18
Number of Pages: 256
Weight: 0.1815 kg
Sheila Kohler moves with assured ease between fiction and biography, between the inner life of Charlotte Bronte as she composes Jane Eyre and the comedy of professional rivalry among the three Bronte sisters. -- J. M. Coetzee
Her work is both spare and sensuous - understated and fraught with tension...involving the reader so intensely. * Joyce Carol Oates *
Becoming Jane Eyre is lush and filled with dark sensuality and the tension of unsaid things. The style is quite different from Charlotte Bronte's in Jane Eyre, yet the tone and imagery and spirit remain in the same realm. Jane Eyre is one of my favourite books and Sheila Kohler one of my favourite writers. -- Amy Tan
Sheila Kohler's imagination - deep and playful, always original - instinctively completes that of her elusive subject, Charlotte Bronte, with such intelligence and perception that we give ourselves over without hesitation. -- Susanna Moore
...a stirring exploration of the passions and resentments that inspired this 19th-century classic. * Washington Post *
With an appreciation for their craft and sympathy for their difficult profession, Becoming Jane Eyre is a tender telling of the Bronte family's saga and the stories they told. * Boston Globe *
Past perfect. * Bella *
