Jayne Anne Phillips Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Jayne Anne Phillips

Praised by such literary notables as Raymond Carver, Tillie Olsen, and Nadine Gordimer, novelist and short-story writer Jayne Anne Phillips has garnered attention from both the literary establishment and popular readers. Phillips's body of work, which includes three novels and four collections of short fiction, draws upon themes that have come to be associated with the twentieth-century American literary tradition, including the effects of psychological damage, communication failures within families and between lovers, danger to children, women's lack of fulfillment in marriage, and the ways in which sex is used and abused in modern society. As critic Meredith Sue Willis has argued, however, Phillips's approach does not "depend so much on her subjects as on a fictional strategy of recreating moments of being. These moments, sometimes almost painful in their intensity, are passages of heightened sense observation that create breakthroughs to the reality underlying the everyday." Phillips has been acclaimed for her ability to speak for the downtrodden and has been called a "poet of deprivation and desire" by Nicci Gerrard of The Observer (29 January 1995).

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