SOURCE: “Goneril's Version: A Thousand Acres and King Lear,” in South Dakota Review, Vol. 33, No. 2, 1995, pp. 105–17.

In the following essay, Keppel traces the reasons why Smiley chooses to tell A Thousand Acres from the perspective of Ginny (the Goneril character).

Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Thousand Acres is both a brilliant retelling of King Lear and a powerful work on its own terms. Like Shakespeare, who drew on well-established sources for his plot, Smiley adopts the basic storyline and gives it new life. The place is a farm in Iowa. The year is 1979: land foreclosures, the oil crisis, a general malaise. Larry Cook, the tough, autocratic owner of a thriving, thousand-acre spread, impulsively decides to turn over its operation to his three daughters. Elder sisters Ginny and Rose, whose husbands work for the old man, go along with the idea. Caroline, youngest and best-loved, a lawyer...