Jane Urquhart Criticism
Jane Urquhart, a Canadian novelist, poet, and short story writer born in 1949, is celebrated for her exploration of themes related to literary Romanticism and the Victorian Era, with a particular focus on estrangement, memory, and history. Her novels often weave complex narratives that blend historical figures and events with rich landscapes and personal histories. Urquhart's work frequently employs parallel storylines and circular structures, exemplified in her debut novel, The Whirlpool (1986), and her subsequent novels Changing Heaven (1990) and Away (1993). As observed in critiques like Eccentrics in a Luminous Maelstrom and The Whirlpool, her focus on historical settings and characters, such as Robert Browning and Emily Brontë, enriches her narratives, while others like The Whirlpool critique the heavy-handedness of this blend.
Urquhart's poetry and short stories, such as False Shuffles (1982) and Storm Glass (1987), reflect her thematic interests in history and memory, often incorporating surrealist elements. False Shuffles draws parallels between poets and magicians, addressing language and meaning, while Jane Urquhart's Short Stories in the Landscape of the Poet notes the poetic quality of her short fiction.
Despite occasional critiques of her narrative techniques, Urquhart's work has been highly acclaimed, earning awards such as France's Prix pour le meilleur livre étranger and Ontario's Trillium Award. Her exploration of Canada’s history and her own Irish heritage in works like Away has been praised for its universal relevance, as noted by reviewers including Away and A Dazzling Novel of Home and Away.
Contents
- Principal Works
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Essays
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False Shuffles
(summary)
In the following positive review, Wayne briefly discusses stylistic and thematic aspects of False Shuffles.
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The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan
(summary)
In the following mixed review, Tregebov asserts that The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan "is a well-written little book … that reveals a poet who could do more if she wanted to."
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Museum & World
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Lemire-Tostevin offers a thematic discussion of The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan. Jane Urquhart has chosen a museum as the setting for her third book. The poems of The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan hover in and out of the rooms and gardens of Versailles in the persona of Montespan who was for a while a favourite mistress of Louis XIV. They pause over catalogued items and saved artifacts like 'loose fragments drawn into new configurations.' They shift behind windows and over brocade coverings of baroque beds; they witness and conjure devious plots; they settle in glass coffins or the frozen ground under lifeless monuments and leafless trees of the carefully kept winter gardens. The six photographs of Versailles by Jennifer Dickson are very effective in both capturing and adding to the mood of the book.
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Sleight of Tongue
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Sowton discusses intertextual aspects and influences of False Shuffles, highlighting the witty problematization of a three-generation history and the subtle semiotics at play in the text.
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An interview with Jane Urquhart and Geoff Hancock
(summary)
In the following interview, Jane Urquhart and Geoff Hancock delve into Urquhart's literary influences, her distinctive fusion of wit and historical imagination in Canadian writing, the impact of her upbringing on her storytelling, her views on literary criticism, the creative process, and the integral role of editors in her work.
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The Whirlpool
(summary)
In the following review, Ledger offers a highly negative assessment of The Whirlpool, describing it as a dissertation masquerading as a novel and criticizing its lack of plot, characterization, dialogue, and drama.
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Eccentrics in a Luminous Maelstrom
(summary)
In the positive review below, Wigston relates the story line of The Whirlpool, noting Urquhart's focus on history and eccentric characters.
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The Whirlpool
(summary)
In the following, Posesorki provides a mixed assessment of The Whirlpool. The person and poetics of Robert Browning cast a giant shadow over Jane Urquhart's ambitious first novel The Whirlpool. In her prologue Urquhart presents the elderly Browning in Venice, overwhelmed by his recollections of the poet Shelley and by portents of his death. This romantically morbid vignette introduces the major leitmotivs of her novel: dreams, obsessions, death, and their relationship to the production of art.
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Storm Glass
(summary)
French is a Canadian editor and critic. In the favorable review below, he surveys several of the stories collected in Storm Glass.
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Through the Looking Glass
(summary)
In the following review, he praises Urquhart's focus on and striking evocation of character, time, and place in Storm Glass.
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Jane Urquhart's Short Stories in the Landscape of the Poet
(summary)
In the review below, Bradbury discusses Storm Glass, its imagery and symbolism, its poetic quality, and its similarities to the works of the Romantics.
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A Gathering of Seven
(summary)
In the excerpt below, he reviews The Whirlpool and Storm Glass. Although faulting Urquhart's ability to effectively sustain narrative movement in her works, he extols the precision of her prose style.
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Inside Stories
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Ashenburg discusses the prominent role of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) in Changing Heaven.
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Niagara Falls Gothic
(summary)
In the following, he provides a negative review of The Whirlpool, describing Jane Urquhart's new book as an almost perfect example of the first novel in the common, and pejorative, sense of the term. He critiques it as a genteel historical novel with Gothic overtones concerning the inactions of abnormally sensitive individuals, noting the disjointed plot strands and excessive symbolism.
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Stormy Weather
(summary)
In the review below, she praises the prose style and originality of Changing Heaven, but faults the novel's structure and Urquhart's attempts to "demystify" Emily Brontë.
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The Whirlpool
(summary)
In the following review, Ramke, an American poet and educator, praises The Whirlpool for the feeling of poetry it conveys.
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The Whirlpool
(summary)
In the following review, Elgaard discusses characterization in The Whirlpool, set in the (Canadian) Niagara of the 1880s, where characters seek life rather than live it. Patrick, the poet, observes landscape and the woman inhabiting it as perfect architecture, while Fleda, the dreamer, engages with Browning's poetics, leading to tension with Patrick. David, Fleda's husband, is obsessed with the ghost of Laura Secord, viewing his historical research as metaphors.
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Ghosts in the Landscape
(summary)
In the following essay, based on an interview with Urquhart, Canton reveals Urquhart's thoughts on the writing process and the role of landscape and the fantastic in her work.
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Train & Balloon
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Macfarlane praises Urquhart's 'tight interlacing of metaphor, structure and theme' in Changing Heaven. Changing Heaven is a novel apparently fragmented into individual stories telling of separate characters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These stories are linked through theme and recurrent images, but the characters, too, begin to merge into each other's stories. Arthur and Ann, two twentieth-century academics, have at first separate chapters, but their stories converge as they become enmeshed in an increasingly stormy affair. The story of two nineteenth-century balloonists parallels Wuthering Heights in some aspects and the ghost of Emily Brontë figures in their tale, told intratextually by a moorland sage Ann is coming to love. In this intense and complicated structure, time is spatialized to bring the stories of these characters together under the (internal) storyteller's control in a frenzied, storm-tossed chapter. These winding stories show the wind to be the book's theme. The academics intellectualize the wind and see it, in art, as a metaphor of passion: Ann associates it with the passion of Wuthering Heights; Arthur is obsessed with the tempest-tossed angels in Tintoretto. One of many angels, fallen or otherwise, who link the narrative levels of the novel is the balloonist Arianna who falls to her death at the start of the novel.
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Away
(summary)
In the following review, Wigston offers a favorable assessment of Away, noting that in Jane Urquhart's fictional renderings of the Canadian past, history is transformed into a series of fluid images. The title of her new novel, Away, reverberates with meaning, indicating both the mysterious condition suffered by Irish peasant women who have encountered a daemon lover and the forced migration of the Irish to Canada due to the potato famine.
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A Dazzling Novel of Home and Away
(summary)
In the following review, Grove-White praises Urquhart's evocation of time and place in Away, noting that despite the specificity of its locale, the novel has universal relevance.
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Art and Revelation
(summary)
In the excerpt below, Harris relates Urquhart's focus on art, creation, and obsessive love in Changing Heaven. The relationship between art, the artist, and the appreciation of art has long intrigued writers of fiction. This theme is explored brilliantly in new novels by Jane Urquhart and other emerging but already masterful authors who freely transcend boundaries between centuries, life and death, and reality and memory.
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Magically Real
(summary)
In the following, McNaughton offers praise for Away. Jane Urquhart's Away is a complex layering of ideas about emotions and emotions about ideas. If that sounds too intellectual, Away is also one of those novels that moves in and takes over your life. Urquhart writes on a very large canvas, spanning more than a century and two continents. The book begins in pre-famine Northern Ireland, when beautiful young Mary pulls a drowning man from a sea awash with cabbages, silver teapots, and casks of whisky. The man dies in Mary's arms. Ever after he is regarded as Mary's demon lover and she is thought to be not of this world—'away.'
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Multigenerational Tale Adds Poetic Lift to Women's Issues
(summary)
Holliday is an American critic. In the following review, she relates the story line of Away. Jane Urquhart is an Irish Canadian who writes with the lilt of the Old Sod. Her third novel, Away, brings alive an old superstition linked to today's consciousness.
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Away
(summary)
In the following, Hewson offers a highly favorable assessment of Away, noting Urquhart's focus on story and voice. The title of Jane Urquhart's third novel Away is not just a reference to Mary, an intriguing character who, on a remote island off the northern coast of Ireland, gets taken by a daemon lover, renamed, and claimed by the 'other-world.' Rather, the condition of being 'away' resonates as a metaphor, reminding us how a writer must feel when she is writing or a reader when she is engaged by fiction, unwilling or unable to leave completely the world of the book, its entrancing geography interrupting the mundane here and now; or how one functions when overcome by passion for another, drifting, as if spellbound, in a dreamlike fog. Urquhart has always been superb at rendering intense states of being, and Away offers plenty of such renderings.
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An interview in Books in Canada
(summary)
In the following interview, Jane Urquhart, in conversation with Elaine Kalman Naves, explores the dichotomy between her inner and outer life, the influence of her 19th-century-like upbringing on her writing, her views on financial challenges faced by women writers, and the familial and cultural inspirations behind her novel "Away."
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False Shuffles
(summary)
- Further Reading