Austen Biographer’s Daughter: FOJ
Happily, the daughter of Pullitzer Prize winner and Austen biographer Carol Shields has followed in her mother’s footsteps and is also a Friend of Jane.
Anne Giardini, profiled in the London Times, relates this bittersweet memory of her mother, who died of breast cancer in 2003.
Writing, reading, children and work brought them together in a new kind of relationship. Their shared love of Jane Austen’s novels initiated an e-mail correspondence for a joint research paper entitled “Martians in Jane Austen”. They took John Gray’s archetypes about men being from Mars and women from Venus and applied them to the characters in her novels. “It was such fun and I thought it would be the first of many such projects,” Giardini says sadly.
Mrs. Giardini recently published her first novel, The Sad Truth About Happiness.
