Charles Dickens: A Life - Softcover

Smiley, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143119923 ISBN 13: 9780143119920

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2011

Synopsis

Rare Book

About this title

Review:

We are setting an 15 August press date for this title, and are set to have high profile, comprehensive reviews in both the national and regional press. Reviews have already appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, and Sunday Times, with further reviews including The Mail on Sunday and The Spectator. Our first early review is in Waterstones Books Quarterly: "Smiley skillfully portrays Dickens' life as it would have been viewed by his contemporaries, his audience and by the subject himself." "Smiley's engaging and often stimulating attempt to penetrate these mysteries approaches Dickens from her own experience as a working novelist.... Smiley pays handsome tribute to him at the end of her book, "He is the novelist who comes closest of all novelists to delivering on that illusory promise of the novel - to tell everything there is to know about everyone, and to tell it in an incomparably fresh and delightful way." This is probably what Smiley would most like as her own epitaph." Simon Callow, TheGuardian "Smiley is a wholeheated enthusiast of Dickens." Observer "Her ideathat Dickens prefigured the celebrity life of the late twentieth century is persuasive and is borne out both in his letters and in other accounts of his reading tours... She is at her best when she offers her own insights." Claire

From the Back Cover:

'Some novelists plow the same field novel after novel. Others map the world. No novelist has mapped so much of the world, right at the borderline where the inner world and the outer world meet, as Charles Dickens. He has inexhaustibly delineated states of mind, emotions, symbols, ideas, the rational life, and the irrational life, but also London and Kent and Manchester and America and Italy and France and Scotland and Sussex and Essex and Norfolk. He is the novelist who comes closest of all novelists to delivering on that illusory promise of the novel - to tell everything there is to know about everyone, and to tell it in an incomparably fresh and delightful way.' Jane Smiley

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0143119923
• ISBN 13: 9780143119920
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224