Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

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Jane talks in one letter about wanting readers who have “a great deal of ingenuity,” who will read her carefully. In wartime, in a totalitarian regime, and in a culture that took the written word far more seriously than we do, she could have expected to find them. A brilliant, illuminating reassessment of the life and work of Jane Austen that makes clear how Austen has been misread for the past two centuries and that shows us how she intended her books to be read, revealing, as well, how subversive and daring--how truly radical--a writer she was. Her comments about Mr Knightley are ludicrous!!!!(Dept of Disclaimers: Mr Knightley is my favorite Austen hero) And I'm not talking about those old boring trite age/closeness of family things that I've fought against repeatedly and written about.

Although I have read The Mysteries of Udolpho, I can’t say I know it very well, therefore I appreciated Kelly pointing out that the links between Mrs Radcliffe’s Gothic novel and Northanger Abbey were much stronger than I had realised. Jane’s original readers would have seen all the parallels that the modern reader misses, and these would have been even stronger if the book had been published straight after it had been written, rather than years later, after Jane’s death. More lively and compelling are the book’s later sections, in which Looser delves into the various groups of readers that used Austen as a political symbol, and into the theatrical adaptations that shaped our image of the author in the 20th century. It’s especially interesting for today’s reader, in a time in which Austen is so often dismissed as a writer for sad women with too many cats, to learn that for many years she was widely considered to be a men’s writer. Looser describes a cultural atmosphere in which Austen was held to be “happily inaccessible to the less-discerning, naïve female readers.” Instead, literary men used Austen fandom as a signifier of their developed aesthetic tastes, and liked to muse over which Austen heroine they would most like to marry. (Elizabeth Bennet seems to have generally won that round.)

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It's a style that allows for a particularly intimate reading experience, which author and Austen expert Dr Paula Byrne believes is one of the reasons many refer to the author simply as 'Jane'. "Sometimes I find it patronising but I think it's also because people do genuinely think of her as a friend. I find this psychologically interesting – all these brilliant things she's doing in a technical sense, make you think 'I feel really relaxed and comforted'." 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. 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.

Or what Jane Austen has been teaching us for over 200 years (and how Clueless we have been about it …) The Age of Brass" finds Kelly's reading of Sense and Sensibility as a book about "property and inheritance--about greed and the terrible, selfish things that families do to each other for the sake of money." For Jane herself, though, fiction isn’t simply an enjoyable embellishment. It can offer deeper truths than fact. It’s in fiction, Jane says, that we should look for “the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties.” 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." If we want to be the best readers of Jane’s novels that we can be, the readers that she hoped for, then we have to take her seriously. We can’t make the mistake that the publisher Crosby made and let our eyes slide over what doesn’t seem to be important.In Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, author Helena Kelly looks past the grand houses, drawing room dramas, and witty dialogue that have long been the hallmarks of Jane Austen‘s work to bring to light the serious, ambitious, subversive concerns of this beloved writer. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-09-23 19:01:54 Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0006 Boxid IA40707619 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier With regards to marriage, there’s not any real evidence for the one-night engagement to Harris Bigg-Wither; the ‘proof’ seems to have been pieced together by a niece who wasn’t even born at the time of the engagement. So it’s possible no one ever proposed to Austen at all! Would she have married if the right man had come along? Maybe. But she’d seen enough of the dangers of marriage and the demands of endless child-bearing to have made her cautious.

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.” And this ought to concern us, because a lot of the images—like the images on the banknote—are simplistic, and some of them are plain wrong. Pemberley isn’t on the scale of the great ducal mansion at Chatsworth; Captain Wentworth doesn’t buy Kellynch Hall for Anne as a wedding present at the end of Persuasion; the environs of Highbury, the setting for Emma, aren’t a golden pastoral idyll. Through a combination of beautifully precise close readings alongside Austen’s biographical, literary and historical context, Kelly shows us that the novels were about nothing more or less than the burning political questions of the day. Contrary to Churchill’s infamous assertion that her characters led “calm lives” free from worry “about the French Revolution or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars”, Kelly reveals an oeuvre steeped in the anxiety and fear of war. She shows us that despite those who “stubbornly insist that despite using the word enclosure, Jane doesn’t really mean it”, at least two of Austen’s novels ( Mansfield Park and Emma) were engaged with the effects of the Enclosure Acts and their attendant dangers of poverty and misery. This is followed by a chapter devoted to each of Jane’s novels and a final one looking at her death. Each of these chapters begins with a fictional section based on one of Jane’s letters which helped set the theme for the chapter. Although I found the book readable in style, I did not like all the content! Enclosure was the turning of common lands into privately held lands for use by the rich only. "Gruel" is Kelly's chapter on Emma, in which Jane references how wealth was concentrated into the hands of a few while workers starved, unable to afford British wheat. The Corn Laws kept the price artificially kept high; good for farmers and disastrous for the working poor.Lccn 2016497536 Ocr tesseract 5.2.0-1-gc42a Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9769 Ocr_module_version 0.0.18 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000738 Openlibrary_edition Looser traces Austen’s legacy: the Aunt Jane who emerged in the years just after her death; the nice old spinster aunt who happened to write a good yarn; the conservative Divine Jane of literary gentleman’s clubs, who gloried in exalting traditional gender roles and a traditional idea of England; the demure rebel icon of the suffragettes, who definitively demonstrated that women were capable of genius and who tore apart gender roles with her pen; the romantic of the sexy Darcy era, who wrote love stories. The Lyme cliffs hold a treasure chest of fossils. The characters in Persuasion make a visit to Lyme where a series of events change their lives. "Decline and Fall" places the novel in perspective of Jane's personal life and the alteration in British society. The book takes place in a brief moment of peace with France, just before Napoleon escapes from Elba.

I was just sort of expecting a fun book where the author points out passages in Austen's work that add credibility to the idea that Jane Austen was a radical thinker for her time. And that does occur here. (Radical, by the way, has a bit of a different usage here, in that it mostly means someone who is open to new ideas, and to rejecting the old if that is the right thing to do. That word has a negative association now that isn't really meant here.) But, what we really get is a pretty thorough breakdown of the most relevant social and historical context that Jane's contemporary readers would have understood implicitly, but we either miss entirely or misinterpret. Austen's own life was a lesson in forbearance. She published her six celebrated novels in the space of seven years and died at the age of only 41. "On paper it looks like she has a secure life but she is sent off to boarding school twice and she almost dies," says Dr Helena Kelly, author of Jane Austen: A Secret Radical. "In the first the whole school got typhus. Her aunt who came to nurse her died. Just imagine the psychological harm of that happening to you – and then she got sent off again." Uncovering a radical, spirited and political engaged Austen, Jane Austen, The Secret Radical will encourage you to read Jane, all over again. 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.Jane wasn’t a genius — inspired, unthinking; she was an artist. She compared herself to a miniature painter; in her work every stroke of the brush, every word, every character name and every line of poetry quoted, every location, matters. Among 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? 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 again I totally agree with you, of course. But when and how exactly did you come to realize her novels are not simply grand houses, balls and dashing heroes?