Jane Smiley retells the tale of “King Lear” through the perspective of one of the evil sisters, in her novel “A Thousand Acres”. While the literary canon places William Shakespeare and his plays at the top of the list, I disagree that the canon should denote what is considered “classic” and what would be disregarded. Jane Smiley's novel is not canonized, but why? Her feminist revision of “King Lear” answers why Goneril and Regan were so evil. I argue that “King Lear” (both the text and the play) does not provide the evidence of dysfunction that Smiley's novel exhibits. “A Thousand Acres” opens up questions about gender formation, issues that are misrepresented and occluded in Shakespeare's “King Lear”. By bringing the trauma of incest to the forefront of the novel, its reverse emotional structures allow the reader to obtain a new perspective to a complex four-century-old play.

This study is a feminist reading of Jane Smiley's novel A Thousand Acres. It focuses on the Cook sisters and their lives in a farming community at a time that coincides with the end of second wave feminism. In particular, it pays attention to the absence of sisterhood among the three sisters in the novel. It analyses first each individual sister including their different approaches to sisterhood and then their failure to unite in the type of strategic, politically motivated notion of sisterhood that was promoted by second wave feminism.          By looking at different reasons why the sisters cannot establish a strong sisterhood my essay aims to demonstrate that A Thousand Acres not only criticises patriarchal society in its portrayal of the Cook family but also, and more importantly, that it criticises second wave feminism by pointing out its failure in terms of promoting a sense of sisterhood.