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Joan of Arc

A Life Transfigured

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Joan of Arc

By: Kathryn Harrison
Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
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About this listen

The profoundly inspiring and fully documented saga of Joan of Arc, the young peasant girl whose "voices" moved her to rally the French nation and a reluctant king against British invaders in 1428, has fascinated artistic figures as diverse as William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Dreyer, and Robert Bresson. Was she a divinely inspired saint? A schizophrenic? A demonically possessed heretic, as her persecutors and captors tried to prove?

Every era must retell and reimagine the Maid of Orleans' extraordinary story in its own way, and in Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured, the superb novelist and memoirist Kathryn Harrison gives us a Joan for our time - a shining exemplar of unshakable faith, extraordinary courage, and self-confidence during a brutally rigged ecclesiastical inquisition and in the face of her death by burning. Deftly weaving historical fact, myth, folklore, artistic representations, and centuries of scholarly and critical interpretation into a compelling narrative, she restores Joan of Arc to her rightful position as one of the greatest heroines in all of human history.

©2014 Kathryn Harrison (P)2014 Random House Audio Biographies & Memoirs Europe France Historical Women Western Europe
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Critic reviews

"The versatile Harrison - novelist, biographer, memoirist and true-crime writer - becomes the most recent in a long list of authors to tell the story of the unusual warrior.... Harrison knew, of course, about the daunting list of previous interpreters, including William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht and Mark Twain. She wisely examines some of those previous interpretations, finding some of the speculation and historicism plausible but some of it wanting. Harrison examines Joan as a sexual being as well as a warrior and perhaps a schizophrenic. The sexuality angle becomes especially provocative when Harrison discusses how God may have favored Joan due to the virginity she advertised so boldly…. Harrison joins the psychobiography school of life writing, doing so with memorable writing and an energetic approach." ( Kirkus Reviews)
"In novelist [Kathryn] Harrison's deft hands, the latest analysis is both vividly detailed and historically grounded. Casting a modern eye on a medieval legend, she is able to breathe new life into the girl, the warrior, the messenger from God, and the saint. In addition to Joan's early years and her fiery path to battle, Harrison also includes Joan's trials, execution, and canonization in the compulsively readable narrative." ( Booklist)
"If you want a badass heroine like Hushpuppy in Beasts of the Southern Wild crossed with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (only with angels & Jesus) read Kathryn Harrison's hair-raising bio of Joan of Arc - the best of six I've read. She weaves a mesmerizing tale of this cross-dressing warrior who made her torturers weep, who plowed her way to the throne and led an army while never shedding a drop of blood. This year's cult book." (Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club and Lit)
"Narrator Cassandra Campbell has a strong, assured voice that transforms the work from a basic history into an intriguing journey of faith and adventure. She reads at an unhurried pace and is careful to speak every word clearly, enabling listeners to become engrossed in the story. Campbell is just as at home with French as she is with English, and she brings a certain verve to the battle scenes and descriptions of Joan's miracles. The result is a fresh interpretation that deserves to be heard." ( AudioFile)

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Barely counts as history

I'll be returning this book, but I wanted to review it before I did.

Given the book's length, I was hoping for a grounded, in-depth history of Joan and some of the historical controversies that have popped up around her. Maybe some good context into Medieval thinking that would help a modern thinker understand the psyches involved. Did Joan really believe in her voices, or was she merely a pawn in other peoples' political plays... or both? Was she an outlier, or did people in that time often have ecstatic religious experiences?

Instead we have an author that makes her biases perfectly clear from the offset, making statements like "Just like Jesus before her, Joan's birth was prophesied" and broadly painting her story with all the nuance of a children's book. It just was bland and insipid. The narrator was ok, but the material she had to work with was not. Other reviewers have complained about her accents, but I didn't even make it far enough to get to them.

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