Thirty-four Ways of Looking at Jane Eyre

Patricia Whitney, former coordinator of Women’s Studies Program at the
University if Prince Edward Island, is the Bank of Montreal Visiting
Scholar in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa.

Joan Givner’s literary biographies of Katherine Anne Porter and Mazo
de la Roche established her as a scholarly writer both within the
academy and beyond. Meanwhile Givner was beginning to approach fiction,
publishing her first collection, Tentacles of Unreason, in 1985 and
thereafter establishing a steady output as she moved from a full-time
appointment as a professor of English at the University of Regina to a
retirement devoted to writing on Vancouver Island. Thirty-four Ways of
Looking at Jane Eyre is positioned at this point of transition. As
Givner writes in the book’s preface: “The narratives in this volume
are the products of a four-year period that began in December of 1993
when I left Regina in a blizzard and flew to British Columbia to start a
new life.”

Determined to challenge dated androcentric notions that find women’s
writing “merely” autobiographical, and no doubt encouraged by
postmodernism’s willingness to permit border transgressions between
genres, Givner has explored “fictional fictions” and “fictions of
autobiography” throughout the last 15 years. It is to this period that
this book belongs in its gathering of fiction, profile, memoir, essay,
lecture, and fictional memoir.

Perhaps the best-known selection is “Chiaroscuro: A Portrait of Elly
Danica,” first published in Books in Canada (September 1995). This
piece, which shows the heroic Danica as a healing and wise woman, is to
date the definitive portrait of Danica.

The only fictional memoir, titled “Untitled” with typical wit,
returns us to familiar Givner territory: cramped, petty, and unlovely
lower-middle-class British life and the relationship between mother and
adult daughter. Forever bound and forever at odds, the two women
struggle with the burdens of the mother’s failing health and the
daughter’s impatience and grim determination to carry out her duty.

Twenty selections provide the reader with a valuable overview of Joan
Givner as mature and innovative feminist writer.