RIP Anita Shreve

I have read many of Anita Shreve’s novels over the years. I have always thought of them as “middlebrow” (see my post of 2/8/10 on “middlebrow” fiction by Shreve and other authors such as Anne Rivers Siddons, Elizabeth Berg, and Joanna Trollope). Of course the label “middlebrow” is very subjective, and could be interpreted as negative, although as I said in my earlier blog about the topic, novels by these authors have given millions of readers, including me, many hours of pleasure. There is also the issue that nowadays the terms "middlebrow" and "women's fiction" are sometimes conflated. Today I want to give tribute to Shreve, who died of cancer on March 29th at the age of 71. Shreve’s 19 novels sold millions of copies, and three of them were made into movies. Many of them were inspired by real life events and characters. Her best known novels were “The Pilot’s Wife” and “The Weight of Water.” Two endearing (to me at least) and telling details that some obituaries mentioned were that she was most inspired as a teenager by Edith Wharton’s novel “Ethan Frome,” and that she preferred to write her novels in longhand. Her novels mostly focus on women characters, often those who are “haunted or traumatized” (according to Hillel Italie’s obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, also the source of some of the other information in this blogpost). In later life, she received not only popular but some critical acclaim. Whatever the labels used about her writing, and these were, as mentioned, in any case both subjective and shifting, Anita Shreve was a dedicated and excellent writer whose enjoyable, gripping, and inspiring works meant so much to so many readers, especially women.