The range and variety of Jane Smiley's work as a writer of fiction have resulted in a great deal of critical attention, a wide and committed readership, and several different perceptions of her achievement. Smiley's novels, particularly those following The Greenlanders (1988), are typically the products of serious research and imaginative rethinking of fundamental cultural issues. At the same time Smiley draws on personal experience of various kinds--equestrian sports, marriage and parenting, environmental issues, autonomous and shared living situations, domestic conversation, and family stories--for the material and ideas that shape her work. Clearly possessing a sensibility attuned to late-twentieth-century life, Smiley was initially inspired by the careers of Jane Austen and George Eliot and the fiction of modernists such as Virginia Woolf. She has long been fascinated by medieval European culture.

Smiley's books include an epic of a doomed Nordic settlement in fourteenth-century Greenland and several family-focused novels, including...