What Became of Jane Austen? And Other Questions by Kingsley Amis. New York. 1971. Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich. hardcover. 223 pages. 0151958602.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Although Kingsley Amis’s reputation rests mainly on his novels, he has since 1955 established himself as one of England’s wittiest and most trenchant essayists and critics. The remarkable variety of his ideas and interests makes the present volume as stimulating and recurrently surprising as it is enjoyable. There is literary criticism of writers as diverse as Hans Christian Andersen, Jules Verne, and Miss Austen herself (Janeites will take umbrage), and of novels from SORRELL AND SON to PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT and LOLITA (‘one of the troubles with LOLITA is that, so far from being too pornographic, it is not pornographic enough’). There are articles on such widely assorted topics as horror movies, fictional detectives, and the National Eistedfodd of Wales, and accounts of the author’s experiences as judge at a beauty contest, with a poet named Dylan Thomas, and with one named Yevgeny Yevtushenko. And there are assorted fragments of autobiography (a reminiscence of the first school he attended, a memoir of his father) and confession (why he wrote a James Bond novel, why he left the Left). This is, in short, a miscellany, and a bracing one; its arrangement is not random, and it should be read straight through rather than browsed in. Kingsley Amis’s characteristically witty, challenging, sometimes enraging voice proves also to be that of a rationalist, a moralist, a man of good sense – and a writer of some of the best prose of our day.
Kingsley Amis was born in South London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and at St John’s College, Oxford, of which he was an Honorary Fellow. Between 1949 and 1963 he taught at the University College of Swansea, Princeton University and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He started his career as a poet and continued to write in that medium ever since. His novels include LUCKY JIM (1954). TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU (1960), THE ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE (1966), ENDING UP (1974), THE ALTERATION (1976), JAKE’S THING (1978) and STANLEY AND THE WOMEN (1984). His novel, THE OLD DEVILS, won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1986. Among his other publications are NEW MAPS OF HELL, a survey of science fiction (1960), RUDYARD KIPLING AND HIS WORLD (1975) and THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION (1981). He published his COLLECTED POEMS in 1979, and has also edited THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF LIGHT VERSE and THE FABER POPULAR RECITER. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981.