Midnight

November 5, 2018
Novelist Shorr (Backlands) starts from the intriguing premise of capturing a pivotal moment in the lives of three famous women—Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Joan of Arc—but falls short in her execution. In Austen’s life, Shorr finds a turning point in the writer’s acceptance and then refusal of a marriage proposal from a wealthy suitor; in Shelley’s, her coming to grips with her famous husband’s drowning; and in Joan of Arc’s, facing her sentence to be burned at the stake. In each case, Shorr provides factual background leading up to each woman’s critical juncture and enters imaginatively into the heads of her subjects, conjecturing what, for instance, Joan of Arc is thinking and feeling as she is being burned. Shorr, however, makes odd stylistic choices, such as the jarring overuse of sentence fragments, and has a propensity for wordy sentences that say too little (“Hampshire home—Jane Austen’s terroir, from which had sprung that precise variety of human comedy that connected her...”). Shorr is best with Joan of Arc, but her work too often does not live up to the potential promised by its fascinating women.

December 15, 2018
What were Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Joan of Arc thinking and feeling during their hours of deepest crisis and despair?Shorr (Backlands, 2015), who co-founded the Archer School for Girls in Los Angeles, combines sturdy biographical research with some flights of imagination to portray three different women caught in the vises of three very different sets of circumstances. Austen (1775-1817), Shelley (1797-1851), and Joan of Arc (1412-1431)--each faced considerable darkness but persisted until light appeared. Austen found herself growing older with no marriage prospects and "without a penny to her name"--then picked up her pen; Shelley had to deal with the deaths of three of her children and a husband (poet Percy Bysshe Shelley) whose eye roamed before he drowned, leaving Mary widowed at 25; Joan, after winning battles for France, was captured and knew a flaming death at the stake would be her fate. In all three stories, Shorr employs a similar strategy, interweaving historical and biographical facts with imagined actions, thoughts, and dialogue. She is not explicit about the connections among the women's lives; she does not point out, for instance, that neither Percy Shelley's nor Joan's heart burned in the flames that consumed their bodies: Shelley's, a cremation on the beach at Viareggio; Joan's, a fiery execution in Rouen. Regardless, the author's voyages into the minds of the women are impressive. Joan battles with another "Joan," whom the author calls "Girl X," a timorous version of herself who wants only to live. Mary comes to terms with her husband's infatuations with other women, deciding each is more muse than potential lover. Jane realizes that her work, "that spark she'd trusted, had caught fire, and lit her life." The detail is a little thick in the Mary section, and the text is a little long in Joan's.A fresh and instructive investigation of three iconic lives and minds.

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March 1, 2019
Shorr (Backlands, 2015) reconstructs the defining moment for three historically significant women as each stands poised on the threshold of a major change in emotional and spiritual direction. For budding author Jane Austen, the turning point is the rejection of a marriage proposal that would have provided her with a financially and socially comfortable position in a society that neither encouraged nor promoted female independence. Initially tested by her husband's infidelity and the loss of three children, young Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, ultimately refused to be broken by grief as she coped with the tragic circumstances of Percy Shelley's untimely death. Finally, and most famously, Joan of Arc had to face and endure a fiery death. Though she provides much factual information, Shorr also takes poetic liberties with the mindsets of these women, imagining the thoughts and feelings of each during individual hours of reckoning. This fanciful collective biography draws parallels between and loosely binds together three disparate, remarkable, unconventional, and influential figures grappling with and overcoming the cruelties of fate, societal expectations, and historical circumstances.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)