Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

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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. In Mansfield Park Austen doesn’t just confront the subject of slavery, but of the Church of England’s active involvement in slavery. To take the Church to task like this really was incendiary, and it’s no coincidence, I think, that Mansfield Park is the only one of her novels which wasn’t reviewed on publication. In fact, there seems to have been something of a conspiracy of silence about it. A crucial step for Kelly's arguments is that Austen's books came out years later than planned. Had they been read in the 1790s the debt to Godwin and Wollstonecraft would have been obvious, but they were misread in a later context. 'Northanger Abbey' is about the threat childbirth posed to women; 'Sense and Sensibility' is a critique of primogeniture and sexual segregation; 'Pride and Prejudice' is driven by the hope of 'escaping society entirely' (p.228); 'Mansfield Park' shows that Jane's anticlericalism is motivated in part by Anglican involvement in slave trade; 'Emma' is really about enclosure; 'Persuasion' is about the inevitability of change. Kelly declares that Elizabeth's marriage to Darcy was a revolutionary moment because of the gulf in class (Elizabeth has connections with trade) In 1825, in real life, up the road from Chawton the owner of Uppark, Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh married his dairymaid. It wasn't that unusual to marry up or down class (although this was a trifle extreme). Other examples of marrying well above your station include the Gunning sisters and Emma Hamilton. And if you want a literary precedent, you need look no further than Pamela. Elizabeth was hardly revolutionary. However, Kelly lost me completely when she started suggesting that all the bedroom scenes in Northanger Abbey had sexual connotations. I prefer to leave Northanger Abbey as a clever play on the Gothic novel.

Much as I loved – and still love – the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice , I was soon introduced to a very different side of Austen. We studied Mansfield Park for A-Level; a novel which has a very un-dashing hero, only one ball, and a heroine who doesn’t end up in the big house. I really struggled with Mansfield Park and I suppose I’ve been trying to bring those two very different sides of Austen into some kind of balance ever since!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. Sense and Sensibility was I think the strongest of her chapters, as it had the most textual revelations, and drew the most surprise from me. I used to identify as somewhat of a Marianne, i.e. far more into romantic notions than what was good for me, so the chapter has special interest to me. 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.

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. Some of the hidden meanings Kelly finds in Austen's writings seem outright ridiculous, such as in the chapter on "Northanger Abbey", when Catherine Moreland finds a key in an old cabinet, Kelly writes, “Let’s not mince words here. With all its folds and cavities, the key, the fingers, the fluttering and trembling, this looks a lot like a thinly veiled description of female masturbation.” I laughed out loud when I read the words and found myself searching for a quote that is the female equivalent Freud's, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar".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. 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.

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 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 from that point on Kelly settles into playing to her strengths, and the book offers a coherent and at least partly credible take on a writer far deeper than most give her credit for. I learned a lot, I saw Austen with fresh eyes, and that’s a lot for me to say after a lifetime of immersion. She even makes me want to reread Emma, and I didn’t think anyone could achieve that! Have we been getting Jane Austen wrong for all these years? Helena Kelly thinks so. She sets out to show us how Austen’s novels have been “so thoroughly, so almost universally, misunderstood”. They have been accepted as safe, escapist, conservative. To many they have apparently offered “a blissful, almost drugged-up break from reality”. But Kelly will pierce the “haze of preconceptions” obscuring Austen’s fiction. She will show us that, far from giving us “demure dramas in drawing rooms”, Austen used her novels to “examine the great issues of her day”. She will teach us to “read Jane’s novels … as she intended”.

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I don’t agree with every conclusion that she draws from her close reading, but she has challenged many of my assumptions about Jane Austen and made me look at the books with much more attention and understanding. This makes them less comforting reading, but it increases my admiration for Austen as as author enormously. 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 Pride and Prejudice was, I felt, the weakest, as much of the analysis focuses on displaying for modern readers quite how much of an affront to rank their really is and hammering home things that are glossed over in the movie adaptations, i.e. the inherent threat of a large group of armed strangers in your town, the poverty facing the Bennet sisters because of entailments, etc. This isn't to say the chapter was bad, per se, but it was more of a soft secret, than the kind of investigative nature of the secrets, as in the etymology behind the Moor Park apricot tree, the men named Norris, and so on.