Smiley, Jane - Tim Keppel (essay date 1995)

Tim Keppel (essay date 1995)

SOURCE: “Goneril's Version: A Thousand Acres and King Lear,” in South Dakota Review, Vol. 33, No. 2, 1995, pp. 105–17.

[In the following essay, Keppel traces the reasons why Smiley chooses to tell A Thousand Acres from the perspective of Ginny (the Goneril character).]

Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Thousand Acres is both a brilliant retelling of King Lear and a powerful work on its own terms. Like Shakespeare, who drew on well-established sources for his plot, Smiley adopts the basic storyline and gives it new life. The place is a farm in Iowa. The year is 1979: land foreclosures, the oil crisis, a general malaise. Larry Cook, the tough, autocratic owner of a thriving, thousand-acre spread, impulsively decides to turn over its operation to his three daughters. Elder sisters Ginny and Rose, whose husbands work for the old man, go along with the idea....

[The entire page is 5088 words long]

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