Janet Burroway - Critical Acclaim, Public Appreciation

Critical Acclaim, Public Appreciation

In the main, Janet Burroway’s work has been greeted with approval, enthusiasm, and, on occasion, rave reviews. Critic Elisabeth Muhlenfeld has called her “a writer of wide range and many voices” who has “consciously avoided current trends.” Author Joan Fry referred to her as “a writer’s writer, a prodigiously talented all-American girl who . . . found her literary voice in England.” Critic Thomas Rankin observed that Burroway’s fiction is known for “its stylistic excellence and tragicomic tone, portraying evil as the result of emotional blindness.” He also notes that Burroway “has been called a Renaissance woman for her achievements as a novelist, teacher, playwright, columnist, and critic,” but that her most important achievement “may be the encouragement and role modeling she provides for young women who aspire to write.”

Known in particular for her complex female protagonists, Burroway enjoys experimenting with technique; she is particularly adept at assuming the speech and thought patterns of characters of another gender, race, or age. But her most important concern is the story itself. Time and again she emphasizes that the authors she most admires (and continues to reread) are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James. “The novelists of the Great Tradition, in Leavis’s term, were absolutely my touchstone.” With characteristic honesty, Burroway admits that in “some ways I think that I have distorted my own vision by living so much of my life in literature, and not seeing the connection between what there is to write about and what’s immediate in my life until very late.”

According to Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, “The Dancer from the Dance and Eyes both received positive reviews but on the whole attracted little notice. (Granville Hicks singled out Eyes in the Saturday Review as a rewarding, well-written book which readers were unfortunately very likely to miss.)” A reviewer for The Guardian, London, praising Raw Silk (the novel that followed The Buzzards), noted that “She writes like a robust angel.” Opening Nights was praised by the Los Angeles Times as “exhilarating, vivid and precise,” and The New Yorker called it “A fine and complex novel, a comedy and then some.” Jonathan Spence observed that Burroway’s seventh novel, Cutting Stone, “is about many things, but perhaps most centrally it is about the mines and quarries of the human heart, and the myriad ways we delve into, gouge out, and transform ourselves.” Walter Clemens, reviewing Opening Nights and Cutting Stone for Newsweek wrote that Burroway is “a subtle novelist with a gift for jolting surprises. . . . Common-sensical though she seems, Burroway is a sneaky virtuoso.”

As if to demonstrate his point, Burroway’s nonfiction is also subtle, surprising, and common-sensical. Booklist, in a review of Embalming Mom, called her “a pithy essayist with an inner compass that steers her to the ambiguity at the heart of the human condition,” and James L. Marra of Temple University, has, with admirable succinctness, called Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft “the best such book on the market.” Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft (Longman and Penguin Academics 2002) received high praise from Porter Shreve (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), among others: “engaging, witty, specific, absolutely clear and propelled by the kind of energetic prose that inspires students to write well.”

In 2005, Elephant Rock Productions in Chicago released a CD hosted by Burroway entitled So, Is It Done? Navigating the Revision Process. A review by The Writer sums up Burroway’s contributions to the art and craft of writing: “ talks about revision with class and grace . . . she encourages you to work harder than you ever imagined, partly because she believes in you and partly because you want to make her proud.”