While Jones’s memoir is a quicker, more effervescent read, Franklin, a loyal amanuensis, has filled in the holes, restored the cultural context and talked up the triumphs in an extraordinary life.
Essential if adulatory ... I don’t mind that The Editor is a valentine. But surprisingly, given the richness of the material, I closed it feeling slightly underfed ... And the editor herself would probably have excised a few of her biographer’s clichés.
Engaging ... The Editor shows how much she did, and how much all good editors do, on and off the page ... Makes an excellent case for Jones’s importance.
The Editor presents [Jones] as both a case study and an agent of change in American conceptions of femininity inside and outside the home. But it also reads, more often than not, like a love story: a great, sweeping seven-decade romance between a woman and her work.
Franklin lionizes her subject yet includes Jones’ admission of mistakes—notably, passing on Plath’s The Bell Jar. Sometimes heavy with dry details, but a thorough and humanizing portrait.
