Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

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Kelly does not seem to have read any of the many Austen scholars and critics who would have shown her that some of her discoveries are not quite unprecedented. She might also have had some salutary encounters with those who have a different case to put. Some 30 years ago, in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Marilyn Butler placed Austen within the ideological disputes of her day and discovered a novelist who was a conservative and a Christian, sharply opposed to the liberal and “Jacobin” novels of her youth. Butler’s deep scholarship does not make her right, but might have made her case worth disputing. She never appears in Kelly’s candidly brief bibliography. Looser is careful to avoid any claims that are attractive in their sweep but reductive in their implications, like the idea that Jane Austen had a single all-encompassing brand in one decade and another in the next. Sexy Darcy was not an innovation of Colin Firth and his wet shirt in 1996, for example, but a trend that emerged from the theater in the 1930s. Jane the demure rebel and Divine Jane the conservative existed at the same time, in many of the same places — but since literary critics have traditionally paid more attention to literary clubs than to suffragettes, the Divine Jane is the only one who traditionally makes it into critical essays. Looser is out to correct these kinds of omissions in Austen scholarship, and her mission is fundamentally populist. The publicists of Helena Kelly’s Jane Austen: The Secret Radical would have us believe that the book is itself a radical document—an upending of all we “know” about Jane Austen. If the “we” envisioned here means fans who have come to Jane Austen through the filmed adaptations and other popular-culture manifestations, those publicists are doubtless correct. Austen scholars, by contrast, will find less that is new or surprising, along with some ideas that are overstated or simply odd. Still, Austen scholars are few and Austen fans are legion, so this book, pitched as it is for the general reader, arguably has a place. Its claims are worth debating at least. An authoress who knew that the novel, until then widely seen as mindless “trash,” could be a great art form and who did a lot — perhaps more than any other writer — to make it into one. Menand says that the conversations in that popular Harvard class - and also the ways we read Jane Austen - are getting more global in scope, and more historical.

They’re intended as glimpses of what the authoress might have been thinking, of how real events and locations, and people, might have made their way into her novels. I don’t claim these as biography; even though they stay close to Jane’s manuscript correspondence, and to her own writing, they’re fiction.If you want to stay with the novels and the Jane Austen you already know, you should stop reading now,” she announces at the end of her introduction. “If you want to read Jane as she wanted to be read — if you want to know her — then read on.”

May I ask you what you think of the great deal of Jane Austen fan fiction and film adaptations of the recent years? Do they contribute to the popularity of her work or do they contribute to their misinterpretation? The speeches that are put into the heroes’ mouths, their thoughts and designs—the chief of all this must be invention.” The older and more intelligent Eleanor Tilney, who reads history chiefly for pleasure, expresses herself “very well contented to take the false with the true.” It feels shameful to admit that I, myself, failed to read Austen until I was 30. But on finally reading and enjoying the richness of her writing with its mixture of social satire, poignancy and dawning epiphanies, I have secured a safe haven to which I will return to for the rest of my life. The key to Austen for me is that she simultaneously comforts and challenges us, embracing the dark and lonely aspects of life but with a lightness of touch and humour much-needed in difficult times.By the time you’ve seen Colin-Firth-as-Mr.-Darcy poised to dive into a lake fifty times, it’s made a synaptic pathway in your brain. Indeed, I’d question whether we can get away from that, certainly how we do.

When discussing titles in the chapter on Pride and Prejudice, Kelly refers to Lady Catherine de Bourgh as the daughter of an earl and claims “there are no more than a handful of them in England.”(6) An earl is indeed the third highest title in the British peerage after duke and marquess as Kelly states, but whilst there were less than 20 English dukedoms and a similar number of marquessates at the start of the Regency, there were decidedly more than ‘a handful’ of earls. According to Debrett’s, there were about 90 English earldoms alone at the start of the Regency – a very large handful!(7) Almost everything we think we know about Jane Austen is wrong. Her novels don't confine themselves to grand houses and they were not written just for readers' enjoyment. She writes about serious subjects and her books are deeply subversive. We just don't read her properly - we haven't been reading her properly for 200 years. Jane Austen, The Secret Radical puts that right. In her first, brilliantly original book, Austen expert Helena Kelly introduces the reader to a passionate woman living in an age of revolution; to a writer who used what was regarded as the lightest of literary genres, the novel, to grapple with the weightiest of subjects - feminism, slavery, abuse, the treatment of the poor, the power of the Church, even evolution - at a time, and in a place, when to write about such things directly was seen as akin to treason. Uncovering a radical, spirited and political engaged Austen, Jane Austen, The Secret Radical will encourage you to read Jane, all over againAmong the several serious subjects Austen dealt with in her major novels – feminism, slavery, abuse, poverty, power – which is the most revolutionary and dangerous of all in your opinion? It’s hard; it requires an effort for most readers to blink those images away, to be able to see Edward Ferrars cutting up a scissor case (a scene that arguably carries a strong suggestion of sexual violence) rather than the 1990s heartthrob Hugh Grant nervously rearranging the china ornaments on the mantelpiece.

The book is split up into sections following each of her published novels, as well as one concerning her life, and her death. Some chapters worked better for me than others. The great chapters contained a unifying theory that brought together the historical context and the actual plot and actions of the characters: Northanger Abbey (where the childbirth stuff is contained, as well as some fascinating stuff about gothic novels), Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice were the standouts, followed pretty closely by the chapter on Persuasion. Unsurprisingly, despite some great historical context concerning slavery, Mansfield Park was one of the weaker ones, as even Kelly (who studies Austen for her job) seems unable to come up with a unifying theory for that book. For as much as the book hints at the subject of slavery and the complicity of the church, that is not what the book is actually about (I have read it twice, and still can't figure out what we're supposed to take away from the story of Fanny and her relations). The subtext may be all about the historical context, but the actual text for me remains obscure. The chapter about Emma was all right, but the subject of enclosure just isn't as interesting to me as it seems to have been to Kelly. Mr. Knightly doesn’t actually love Emma, he only wants control over Hartford, so that he can enforce more enclosures of the land.

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In Northanger Abbey, published after Austen's death and years too late for the audience it was intended for--readers who were well versed in the Gothic novel of the 1790s--Kelly sees "The Anxieties of Common Life."