Thirty-Four Ways of Looking at Jane Eyre — Joan Givner

Fiction. Literary Criticsm. Joan Givner engages the heart and mind in this refreshing and readable collection of short stories and essays. Nineteen pieces demonstrate how fiction insinuates itself into non-fiction, and how biography finds its way into fiction. Implicitly feminist, Givner's compassionate yet unflinching eye vividly renders each secret pain and joy of her protagonists' experience. Life writing life reading, life itself: all jump out in multidimensional clarity. I went there for the first time when I was fifteen, exactly Miranda's age when she left her protected island in the Tempest. It was an ending as well as a beginning for because I broke then the tradition of the annual family holiday that had been the high point of our lives in a post-war Lancashire mining village. (A House on the Outskirts of Paris). Joan Givner, the acclaimed biographer of Katherine Anne Porter and Mazo de la Roche and author of four volumes of poetry, was for many years professor of English at the University of Regina.