Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

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Despite leading a private, mostly rural life, Austen was well informed and lived in a family that read and thought widely, a family that argued ideas over the dinner table. Helena Kelly’s publisher got her kicks in early by scheduling the British release of her book last autumn. To support her contention that for Anne Elliot in Persuasion, “time not only changes, it destroys, it obliterates”, she quotes from the novel about the long years since Anne last saw Captain Wentworth. Rather, it was the culmination of a hard-fought campaign that I started when the bank announced that the only female historical figure on our banknotes was being replaced with Winston Churchill. Another of Jane's sisters-in-law collapsed and died suddenly at the age of thirty-six; it sounds very much as if the cause might have been the rupturing of an ectopic pregnancy, which was, then, impossible to treat.

For instance, "The word 'sadist' hasn't been coined when Jane was writing, but that's undoubtedly what Mr. g., her discussion of Austen’s obituaries and speculations about how she came to be buried in Winchester Cathedral was fascinating). 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.e. far more into romantic notions than what was good for me, so the chapter has special interest to me. For example, it had not occurred to me to look at Emma through the lens of the enclosure controversy, or Persuasion in the context of the kinds of doubts that arise when people start to encounter the logic of evolution.

The publicists didn’t help by branding the book as revolutionary; many of its ideas can be found in that neglected body of scholarship. When Catherine Morland excitedly unfastens a locked cabinet in Northanger Abbey, Kelly finds something more than a delicious parody of gothic convention. She decides that Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility is probably the biological father of the young woman Willoughby has seduced. A sublime piece of literary detective work that shows us once and for all how to be precisely the sort of reader that Austen deserves.Threats from abroad (wars with France and America; the French Revolution) made for a country on alert for threats from within, where “any criticism of the status quo was seen as disloyal and dangerous”. It’s a pity that the weakest chapter—about Northanger Abbey—comes first, and that its greatest weakness, a fondness for reading sexual imagery into the text, is repeated in the second chapter. But many or most of her readers also need to be alive to the fact that she’s more than that, and Kelly’s book—even when you might disagree with it or laugh at the overreaches—will help you get there. The book is split up into sections following each of her published novels, as well as one concerning her life, and her death.

Her face has been chosen to appear on Britain’s 10-pound note (the same amount she was first paid by a publisher). The Northanger Abbey chapter was insightful about the use of the Gothic within that text, if I ever get around to actually reading the Mysteries of Udolpho, I intend to read both NA and the chapter here again. When the contrast is drawn between the noble Lady Catherine’s behaviour and Elizabeth Bennet’s aunt and uncle, the Gardiners, who are in trade, the reader’s conclusion is inevitable: good breeding has nothing to do with titles. I accepted this review copy on the basis that it promised new insights into the novels through greater knowledge of the period in which Jane Austen wrote. I laugh out loud when I read Austen because I hear the words of an angry women lashing back at the stuffy society in which she existed.There are some interesting close readings here, but a lot of her readings are stretching way too far with not enough evidence to back them up -- and given the paucity of notes and titles in the bibliography, this is not really a surprise.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. The year 2016 belonged to Shakespeare; 2017 is Jane Austen’s, the 200th anniversary of her premature death. But surely it was not Exeter where Edward was educated but at Longstaple near Plymouth at the house of Lucy Steele’s uncle, Mr Pratt?It makes the contrasting ideas and perspectives in her novels all the more intriguing because it was a mind at work and the ideological tensions are worth sorting out. I found this book to be frustrating for a couple of reasons, mostly for the way that Kelly constantly acts like she is the first person to ever imply that Austen's writing was subversive and radical. I certainly ought to, as one chapter in my new book ( What Regency Women Did For Us) is given over to my favourite author!