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Jill Dawson

Autor von The Great Lover

19+ Werke 1,054 Mitglieder 52 Rezensionen Lieblingsautor von 1 Lesern

Über den Autor

Jill Dawson has taught at Amherst College, Massachusetts and is currently the Creative Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

Beinhaltet den Namen: Jill Dawson

Bildnachweis: Tim Allen

Werke von Jill Dawson

The Great Lover (2009) 252 Exemplare
Fred and Edie (2000) 184 Exemplare
Watch Me Disappear (2006) 114 Exemplare
The Crime Writer (2016) 107 Exemplare
Wild Boy (2003) 84 Exemplare
The Virago Book of Wicked Verse (1992) — Herausgeber — 82 Exemplare
Lucky Bunny (2011) 45 Exemplare
The Tell-Tale Heart (2014) 43 Exemplare
The Virago Book of Love Letters (1994) — Herausgeber — 28 Exemplare
The Language of Birds (2019) 27 Exemplare
The Bewitching (2022) 25 Exemplare
Trick of the Light (1996) 16 Exemplare
Magpie (1998) 12 Exemplare
Gas and Air: Tales of Pregnancy and Birth (2002) — Herausgeber — 11 Exemplare

Zugehörige Werke

Erotica: Women's Writing from Sappho to Margaret Atwood (1990) — Mitwirkender — 168 Exemplare
Common People: An Anthology of Working-Class Writers (2019) — Mitwirkender — 53 Exemplare

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Rezensionen

The Bewitching is based on the true story about the witches of Warboys. Alice Samuel is a wise women and is called to the Throckmorton House to help one of the daughters who is having fits. Alice is then accused of bewitching the young girl and is accused of being a witch. The story then goes on from there.

The story is told mainly from the pov of Martha, a maid in the Throckmorton house. We follow the family as not one daughter is afflicted by the fits so do the others. I couldn't help but think that the affictions of these young girls was very similar to what happened in Salem and the witch trials there.

I enjoyed the story. Firstly because of it being based on real events that I knew nothing about and secondly because it's witchy. I did find myself enjoying the story but did find at times however it was a little repetitive especially in the middle section. The final part 'The Trial' did make up for it and also included more about Alice and her story.

Overall an interesting book based on real events.
… (mehr)
 
Gekennzeichnet
tina1969 | 1 weitere Rezension | Mar 31, 2023 |
Martha has served the Throckmorton family for years, looking after their children, and now the family has moved to a large and comfortable house in a fenland village. However the girls start suffering fits and then one of them accuses a neighbour, Alice Samuel, of bewitching them. What chance does Alice have against the godly and highborn family who accuse her?
Set in Tudor times, this story predates most of the tales of witchfinding in the 17th century but it does not fall into the trap of being a 'tudor' novel. The book is a fictionalised account of a true story in which a local woman was accused of causing death by witchcraft which was a hanging offence. The story is ambiguous in places, particularly with regard to the relationships with the Throckmorton family but is sympathetically written and very sad.… (mehr)
 
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pluckedhighbrow | 1 weitere Rezension | Aug 9, 2022 |
The Author Kills

Can we separate an author from her work? In other words, even if the author would be someone we’d be hard pressed to like, even tolerate, as an acquaintance, can we just ignore the real person and enjoy and admire her work? Absolutely, unless she bases her work on nefarious deeds carried out in real life … oh, heck, even then, and maybe more so, for then we know the crime writer actually knows of what she writes. Jill Dawson uses facts pulled from Patricia Highsmith’s life, among them her depression and depressive personality, her conflicted relationship with her mother, her desire for solitude and interaction on her own terms, her preference for animals over humans, her alcoholism, and her sexuality to imagine author Highsmith as serial killer. It’s an arresting concept that almost works, except for stretches when it becomes muddled by too much philosophizing, which make the novel seem lengthier than its 240 pages.

So, to offer another self-preservation answer the opening question, maybe not in the case of Dawson’s Highsmith, for you would be placing your life in her hands, hands that murder repeatedly. Highsmith has taken a cottage in Suffolk, England, to get away from things, and to write three books simultaneously, two novels and a how-to. She’s drinking too much, smoking incessantly, collecting snails and mating them (oh yes, indeed, she did like snails), worrying about her nosey old neighbor, fretting over a possible stalker, waxing literary with her male, gay, poet friend Ronnie, and most of all, obsessing over the love of her life at the moment, Sam. Sam lives in London, is married to a successful banker named Gordon, and has a young daughter, Minty. Gordon isn’t the nicest of fellows, as he is controlling, abusive, and jealous, thinking that Sam may have a lover on the side, a male lover. Patricia and Sam manage a couple of assignations. But then Gordon decides to pay a surprise visit on Sam and the girlfriend she claims to be visiting. Things get out of hand and the novel morphs from The Price of Salt into a blend of Crime and Punishment and Highsmith’s novels. This doesn’t really give anything away because the crux of tale deals with Highsmith’s psychological state.

Holding onto Sam’s affection and Gordon are not Highsmith’s only challenges. Up pops a young, vivacious, rich wannabe reporter, Virginia (Ginny) Smythson-Balby. She wants to interview Patricia, then after that she reveals she’s working on a biography of Highsmith, but then, really, she is the assistant to the biographer. Highstreet rails about Smythson-Balby but also finds herself attracted to her. Part of the reason is that she believes she knows young Smythson-Balby from a lesbian bar, maybe in Greenwich Village, could have been Paris. In the end, many of the fears plaguing her throughout the novel reveal themselves and her dicey situation with Gordon’s demise, and her Raskolnikov-like turmoil, get something of a resolution, à la Tom Ripley.

Those fans of or simply interested in Patricia Highsmith will like that Dawson includes Highsmith novels she used in writing the book, as well as other sources she consulted. If you are a Highsmith fan and know her work, you are the prime candidate for Dawson’s novel. Otherwise, you may find it at times tough slogging.
… (mehr)
 
Gekennzeichnet
write-review | 4 weitere Rezensionen | Nov 4, 2021 |
The Author Kills

Can we separate an author from her work? In other words, even if the author would be someone we’d be hard pressed to like, even tolerate, as an acquaintance, can we just ignore the real person and enjoy and admire her work? Absolutely, unless she bases her work on nefarious deeds carried out in real life … oh, heck, even then, and maybe more so, for then we know the crime writer actually knows of what she writes. Jill Dawson uses facts pulled from Patricia Highsmith’s life, among them her depression and depressive personality, her conflicted relationship with her mother, her desire for solitude and interaction on her own terms, her preference for animals over humans, her alcoholism, and her sexuality to imagine author Highsmith as serial killer. It’s an arresting concept that almost works, except for stretches when it becomes muddled by too much philosophizing, which make the novel seem lengthier than its 240 pages.

So, to offer another self-preservation answer the opening question, maybe not in the case of Dawson’s Highsmith, for you would be placing your life in her hands, hands that murder repeatedly. Highsmith has taken a cottage in Suffolk, England, to get away from things, and to write three books simultaneously, two novels and a how-to. She’s drinking too much, smoking incessantly, collecting snails and mating them (oh yes, indeed, she did like snails), worrying about her nosey old neighbor, fretting over a possible stalker, waxing literary with her male, gay, poet friend Ronnie, and most of all, obsessing over the love of her life at the moment, Sam. Sam lives in London, is married to a successful banker named Gordon, and has a young daughter, Minty. Gordon isn’t the nicest of fellows, as he is controlling, abusive, and jealous, thinking that Sam may have a lover on the side, a male lover. Patricia and Sam manage a couple of assignations. But then Gordon decides to pay a surprise visit on Sam and the girlfriend she claims to be visiting. Things get out of hand and the novel morphs from The Price of Salt into a blend of Crime and Punishment and Highsmith’s novels. This doesn’t really give anything away because the crux of tale deals with Highsmith’s psychological state.

Holding onto Sam’s affection and Gordon are not Highsmith’s only challenges. Up pops a young, vivacious, rich wannabe reporter, Virginia (Ginny) Smythson-Balby. She wants to interview Patricia, then after that she reveals she’s working on a biography of Highsmith, but then, really, she is the assistant to the biographer. Highstreet rails about Smythson-Balby but also finds herself attracted to her. Part of the reason is that she believes she knows young Smythson-Balby from a lesbian bar, maybe in Greenwich Village, could have been Paris. In the end, many of the fears plaguing her throughout the novel reveal themselves and her dicey situation with Gordon’s demise, and her Raskolnikov-like turmoil, get something of a resolution, à la Tom Ripley.

Those fans of or simply interested in Patricia Highsmith will like that Dawson includes Highsmith novels she used in writing the book, as well as other sources she consulted. If you are a Highsmith fan and know her work, you are the prime candidate for Dawson’s novel. Otherwise, you may find it at times tough slogging.
… (mehr)
 
Gekennzeichnet
write-review | 4 weitere Rezensionen | Nov 4, 2021 |

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