Jane Austen

Carol Shields

Jan 2001 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Donada Peters

About this audiobook

With the same sensitivity and artfulness that are the trademarks of her award-winning novels, Shields here explores the life of a writer whose own novels have delighted readers for the past 200 years. In Jane Austen, Shields follows this superb novelist from her early family life in Steventon to her later years in Bath, her broken engagement, and her intense relationship with her sister Cassandra. She reveals both the very private woman and the acclaimed author behind the enduring classics Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. With its fascinating insights into the writing process from a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, Carol Shields's magnificent biography of Jane Austen is also a compelling meditation on how great fiction is created.

"This tightly written biography brings Austen to life in a way rarely seen. Here she is the living, breathing woman not the prim literary classic. Outstanding job."—Booklist

About the author

Carol Shields (1935–2003) is the author of The Stone Diaries, which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Canada's Governor General's Award. Her other novels and short story collections include The Republic of Love, Happenstance, and Swann. Shields’s work has been translated into 33 languages.

Donada Peters, an award-winning actress, has narrated more than 500 titles since the 1980s, and is an acclaimed “Golden Voice” of audiobook recording. A transplanted Brit, she lives in California and, when not behind the microphone, works on stage, film, and TV. She has an unerring ear for various British and European accents and is often called upon to perform specific types of accents.