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Dec 31, 2014WVMLStaffPicks rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Although Carol Shields considered herself an amateur Austen scholar, this sympathetic portrait belies this notion. Like Jane Austen, Shields had keen powers of observation, and she reveals in turn a daughter, a sister, an aunt and nanny to many nieces and nephews, and an author who, isolated from the rest of the literary world, produced six major novels before her death at forty-one. This biography is one of many in the excellent Penguin Lives series.