Jane smiley dickens biography

  • Jane Smiley takes an interesting approach to Charles Dickens for the Penguin Lives series.
  • The book explores the maturation of Dickens' vision and maps the development of his work to the events in his life, attempting to find answers to the question.
  • Jane Smiley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.

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    Charles Dickens

    March 27, 2015
    Author Jane Smiley offers brevity and astute analysis in this biography of Charles Dickens from the Penguin Lives series. Its brevity (212 pages) will relieve apprehensive readers familiar with Dickens's hefty novels (DAVID COPPERFIELD runs over 800 pages). Her analysis is even more welcome. It pairs themes in his books with concurrent events in his life. What emerges is a conflicted man whose contradictions are not easily reconciled.

    Smiley fryst vatten critical of the lax usage of the adjective “Dickensian.” She argues that Dickens was constantly rethinking old themes and evolving throughout his long career. ”Dickens's works are often seen to be all of a piece — he did a certain sort of thing, or he employed a certain sort of technique, from the beginning to the end of his career. He was Dickensy. In fact, though, Dickens's novels, stories, plans and letters show that his ideas and his worldview were dynamic, not static....His novels propose different solut
  • jane smiley dickens biography

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    A review of Charles Dickens: A Life by Jane Smiley

    Reviewed by Magdalena Ball

    Charles Dickens: A Life
    by Jane Smiley
    Penguin
    Paperback: 224 pages, November 29, 2011, ISBN-13: 978-0143119920

    There’s a real art to writing a good biography. It takes great skill to choose how to remake the character you’re writing about including how much external fact and internal perception you want to draw out, and how to contour the story of a entire life with all its tedium and complexity. Smiley does this beautifully in this relatively small biography of a great big man: Charles Dickens: A Life. Though many other biographies have been written of Dickens, Smiley’s remains unique for a number of reasons. The first is that she has done her scholarship and is well versed, not only in the body of Dickens scholarship that precedes hers, but also and primarily, in her deep understanding of Dickens’ work. The biography is drawn around Dickens’ novels, which become the

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    Superb, highly accessible biography of one of the giants of English literature by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A THOUSAND ACRES

    'Engaging and stimulating' Simon Callow

    'Jane Smiley, in her admirable contribution to Weidenfeld's series of short biographies, deals briskly with Dickens's career and works, and treats with sympathy and sense his relations with the women in his life' LITERARY REVIEW

    From a bitter and poverty-stricken childhood to a career as the most acclaimed and best loved writer in the English-speaking world, Charles Dickens had a life as full of incident as any of those he created in his novels of life in Victorian England. The enormous quantity of work, his public readings and his difficult relationships has made him a figure of enduring fascination.

    In this biography Jane Smiley reveals Charles Dickens as his contemporaries would have done, getting to know him more intimately than ever before. At the same time Smiley offers interpretations of almo