Sheila Kohler
Sheila Kohler is the author of seven novels, including Crossways, The Perfect Place, Cracks, Children of Pithiviers, Bluebird, or The Invention of Happiness, and most recently, Becoming Jane Eyre. Her work has been published in nine countries. A native of South Africa, Kohler lived in Paris for fourteen years. She currently makes her home in New York City and teaches at Bennington College in Vermont.
"Sheila Kohler brings her courageous and resourceful heroine vividly to life in a stirring story of revolutionary times" —J.M. Coetzee
News
CRACKS, directed by Jordon Scott and starring Eva Green, will be distributed in the US by IFC, schedule to be announced soon. It has been released in France (Canal Plus) and in the UK (Optimum). You can see a trailer for the movie here.
Sheila Kohler's novel, BECOMING JANE EYRE, about how Jane Eyre came to be written, is now available from Penguin. LOVE CHILD, her newest novel, will be published by Penguin in the summer of 2011.
Links
Sheila Kohler official websiteBooks
Bluebird or The Invention of Happiness
is a radiant and artful novel based on the life of Lucy Dillon, an 18th-century French aristocrat. Her intelligence, beauty, and lack of pretension made Lucy a favorite of luminairies like Talleyrand and Germaine de Stael--and equipped her to survive the "Terror" that swept France in the wake of the Revolution. Possessed of considerable wit and practicality, Lucy manages to keep her beloved husband and small children safe while all her former circle, including King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, are guillotined.
Eventually securing passage on a small ship bound for Boston, Lucy and her family settle in the Hudson Valley near Albany. Exhilirated by the personal and political freedom she finds in America, Lucy views her time there not as "exile," but rather as "opportunity"--and the former palace darling proudly turns dairymaid, establishing a successful farm and embracing all the challenges and adventures the New World presents her.
(Other Press, April 2007)
Cracks
In Sheila Kohler’s brilliant 1999 novel (now reissued in paperback), a beautiful schoolgirl mysteriously disappears into the South African veld. Forty years later, thirteen members of the missing girl’s swimming team gather at their old boarding school for a reunion, and look back to the long, dry weeks leading to Fiamma’s disappearance. As teenage memories and emotions resurface, the women relive the horror of a long-buried secret. A stunning and singular tale of the passion and tribalism of adolescence, Cracks lays bare the violence that lurks in the heart of even the most innocent.
(Other Press, June 2006)
Becoming Jane Eyre
The year is 1846. In a cold parsonage on the gloomy Yorkshire moors, a family seems cursed with disaster. A mother and two children dead. A father sick, without fortune, and hardened by the loss of his two most beloved family members. A son destroyed by alcohol and opiates. And three strong, intelligent young women, reduced to poverty and spinsterhood, with nothing to save them from their fate. Nothing, that is, except their remarkable literary talent.
So unfolds the story of the Bronte sisters. At its center are Charlotte and the writing of Jane Eyre. Delicately unraveling the connections between one of fiction's most indelible heroines and the remarkable woman who created her, Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre will appeal to fans of historical fiction and, of course, the millions of readers who adore Jane Eyre.
(Viking/Penguin, December 2009)