MIDNIGHT THREE WOMEN AT THE HOUR OF RECKONING

'Written with a novelist's narrative flair and a biographer's factual command, Shorr recreates and reassesses the lives of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and Joan of Arc at their hour of reckoning.' - John Lahr. 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. This multifaceted biography takes us to the hour of her decision between financial security and her writing life. She accepted his proposal, only to withdraw it. When 16-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 at the point of this biography we find 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. She writes Frankenstein as her life careens out of control. 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. The biography tells the story of her final days, between her terrified recantation and her heroic return to the stake. Richly detailed in descriptions and feelings, we really feel we are with these women at their decisive moments in life. 299pp.