SMILEY, Jane. A Thousand Acres. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2008.

Octavo. Full deep blue leather. Spine with four raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design, lettering and fore-edges. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 371 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Signed Modern Classics series. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

Jane Smiley (b. 1949) was born in Los Angeles and grew up in St. Louis. She took her PhD at the University of Iowa, where she subsequently taught, and has produced a body of work of remarkable range: novels from the medieval Iceland of The Greenlanders (1988) to the contemporary California of the Last Hundred Years trilogy, as well as criticism, memoir, and nonfiction on subjects from horses to Shakespeare. A Thousand Acres won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and remains her best-known novel.

The premise is among the most audacious in contemporary American fiction: a transposition of King Lear to a thousand-acre farm in Zebulon County, Iowa, in 1979. Larry Cook is the patriarch — a successful, respected farmer who abruptly announces that he will divide his land among his three daughters. Ginny and Rose, the two elder daughters who have stayed on the farm with their husbands, accept. Caroline, the youngest, a lawyer in Des Moines who has made a life away from the land, hesitates — and is immediately and furiously cut out of the inheritance. The Lear parallel unfolds from there with the logic of a tragedy: the father's deterioration, the unravelling of the family, the old secrets that rise to the surface when the structures that contained them are disturbed.

What Smiley adds to Shakespeare's framework is a radical act of narrative reassignment: the novel is told entirely from Ginny's perspective — Goneril, in the original — and the daughters who in King Lear are the villains become, in this retelling, women whose behaviour is legible only when the history behind it is understood. The novel makes that history explicit, and in doing so performs a sustained feminist re-reading of one of the most powerful patriarchal narratives in Western literature. It is a novel that treats the Iowa landscape — the flat, engineered fertility of tiled and drained and fertilised land — with the same attentiveness it brings to its characters, and that draws a quiet, steady parallel between the management of the land and the management of women. The 1997 film adaptation starred Michelle Pfeiffer as Ginny, Jessica Lange as Rose, and Jason Robards as Larry Cook.

Near fine. A few small patches of loss to cover gilt; very faint spotting to fore-edge gilt. Otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000536