Midnight: Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning

by Victoria Shorr

Overview

Exquisite and nuanced in its storytelling, Midnight crafts intimate, humanizing portraits of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Joan of Arc that ask us to behold the women behind the icons.

Midnight is a study in the courage of three women—Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Joan of Arc. Jane Austen was poor in 1802, unmarried and homeless. She had outlines, ideas, and first drafts of her future novels but no place to sit and write them. It is at this bleak moment that she receives an offer of marriage from a rich man. Midnight takes us to the hour of her decision between financial security and her writing life.

When sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin elopes to France with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, she scoffs at the cost—life as an outcast. Together they travel through Europe, reading and writing, but Midnight finds her alone, eight years later, pacing a terrace overlooking the Italian shore, watching for Shelley to sail home over stormy seas in a shaky boat.

Joan of Arc, imprisoned in chains, kept her faith for a long year. Be brave, daughter of God, her saints had whispered, you will be saved—and she believes it, until she is taken to be burned at the stake. Midnight is the story of Joan’s final days, between her terrified recantation and her heroic return to the stake.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393652789
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/12/2019
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Victoria Shorr is a writer and political activist. She is the author of three works of fiction, including the acclaimed historical novel The Plum Trees. She lives in New York and Santa Barbara, California.

Table of Contents

Author's Note xi

Midnight and Jane Austen 1

Mary Shelley on the Beach 51

Joan of Are in Chains 163

Acknowledgments 283

Notes 285

Bibliography 293

Editorial Reviews

Like Shorr's debut, the fictional Backlands, this book too is written in pacey, novelistic prose, animating the women's lives with easy intimacy …Shorr is remarkably good at making these oft-told stories seem as exciting as lived experience. Percy Shelley's death is particularly moving, and Austen regains the poverty-stricken, female vulnerability so easily forgotten because it's so at odds with the assurance of her novels.

The New York Times Book Review - Lara Feigel

11/05/2018
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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Shorr is remarkably good at making these oft-told stories seem as exciting as lived experience."

New York Times Book Review

"Enthralling. The last pages had me sitting bolt upright, completely oblivious to anything but Joan of Arc's last moments. I've never read anything like this book."

Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

"Written with a novelist’s narrative flair and a biographer’s factual command … [Midnight] delights and informs on every bold page."

John Lahr

"[A] gripping, imaginative foray into the lives of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Joan of Arc, as each faced a life-altering event."

Devoney Looser

2018-11-21

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.

Kirkus Reviews