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John Crowley
John Crowley was born December 1, 1942 in Presque Isle, Maine. This American author of science fiction,
fantasy, and mainstream fiction, studied at Indiana University. He is best known as the author of the fantasy
book Little, Big (1981), which won the World Fantasy Award. His shorter Great Work of Time, which
was originally included in the story collection Novelty, was later reprinted as a separate paperback
after it won the 1990 World Fantasy Award. He has had a second career as a documentary film writer.
In 1993, Crowley took up a post at Yale University where he began teaching courses in Utopian fiction,
fiction writing, and screenplay writing.
John Crowley Tribute Site
Bio/Bibliography:
ISFDB,
1,
2,
3,
4
Filmography: 1
Commentary/reviews of Crowley's works:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6
Interviews:
1,
2
E-TEXTS:
"The Happy Place"
Subterranean Press
Excerpt from The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines
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A review by Georges T. Dodds
A number of reviewers have stated that John Crowley is the sort of writer whose works you either immediately take to or are
immediately put off by — I must admit upon reading my first Crowley work, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines
to be firmly in the former camp. A number of published and even highly marketable writers can tell a story, and then some,
like Talbot Mundy, Algernon Blackwood, Ray Bradbury and John Crowley, are storytellers (or raconteurs) — quite
a different kettle of fish. Sometimes storytelling is about leaving some mystery, sometimes it is about not driving the
plot forward with surprise or cliffhanger events, sometimes it is about developing a rapport with the reader akin to sitting
across a table from the author, sipping a beer, and reminiscing about the "good ol' days," sometimes it is
about — especially in a novella — knowing what details are superfluous, sometimes it about knowing when
to leave the story off, knowing when the point has been made. In so doing, Crowley's narrator retrospectively
immerses us in late 50s middle-America, inside a fledgling, small-town Shakespeare company. In this community of
young stagehands, actors and others, a low key romance — the old fashion man-woman kind — develops. While
it is in part a discovery of the physical aspects of love, it is far more about the development of a steadfast and
supportive, if interrupted, relationship.
Woven in there is a good bit of detail about speculations and arguments regarding Shakespeare's identity which the
less literarily inclined might find tedious, but are quite interesting and much easier to take when presented in 92
pages of John Crowley than the near 1000 pages of Ignatius Donnelly [The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher
in Shakespeare's Plays (1888)].
The title of the novella is drawn from a collection of the same title published in 1850-1851 by Mary Cowden
Clarke, who along with her husband was a noted Shakespeare scholar. In her The Girlhood of Shakespeare's
Heroines, Mrs. Clarke imagined the childhood of Shakespeare's heroines in a series of
tales (e.g. "The Girlhood of Ophelia") which were groundbreaking
in their portray of free-spirited women, and of a number of women's issues which were not spoken of at the
time (see here). Similarly to Clarke's emancipated Victorian
women, Crowley presents the main female character as a free-spirited young woman, born perhaps ten years too
early — having her Summer of Love in 1959 instead of 1969 — who doesn't fit in with the role she is
supposed to fill in society. I'm not entirely sure what her rather unfortunate ultimate fate is meant to represent,
perhaps a comment about the ravages of age from an author now in his sixties, perhaps some parallel with the not
always happy fates of Shakespeare's adult heroines, but it is not incongruent with the rest of the tale. Whether
the story has a autobiographical feel because it is so in part, or whether it is simply well enough written to
appear to be so I'm not sure, but certain the author conveys a great deal of emotion, in this brief but delightful tale.
Copyright © 2005 Georges T. Dodds
Georges Dodds is a research scientist in vegetable crop physiology, who for close to 25 years has read and collected close to
2000 titles of predominantly pre-1950 science-fiction and fantasy, both in English and French. He writes columns on early
imaginative literature for WARP, the newsletter/fanzine of the Montreal Science Fiction and
Fantasy Association and maintains a site reflecting his tastes in imaginative literature.
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