Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

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Kelly argues in lucid terms for a thinking, challenging, contrarian-minded Jane Austen who has a tremendous gift for subtlety and who makes her points through deceptively cosy, everyday stories. The marriage plot is for Austen a Trojan horse, infiltrating her ideas into the reader’s consciousness without our fully realizing it. Is she lots of fun to read? Yeah, that too. 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.

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 sweeps the board clear of all previous critical commentary — just so much clutter, we must understand. Claire Tomalin’s acclaimed 1997 biography is dismissed in a footnote as having hopelessly missed the point of “Mansfield Park.” R. W. Chapman, the scholar who founded modern Austen studies, is a purveyor of “nonsense.” Deirdre Le Faye, who produced the authoritative edition of Austen’s letters and with whom I wrote “So You Think You Know Jane Austen,” apparently didn’t. (Nor, one assumes, did I.) Critics who would seem, on the face of it, congenial are resolutely blanked. In 1979, Warren Roberts produced a thoughtful study called “Jane Austen and the French Revolution.” The great event is never mentioned in the novels, but it is there, Roberts argues, invisibly woven into the narratives. Kelly makes the same point herself to support her “secret radical” thesis. But Roberts’s conclusions are cautious. Kelly’s are adventurous. Some work better than others. I would hope that these vulnerabilities would not discourage too many readers, however, because there is much of value here. It’s a rare talent to be able to stand outside received wisdom and see familiar material with fresh eyes; Kelly is a pure outside-the-box thinker. And I think she’s right on many points. Mansfield Park really is about slavery—I would even take her claim further and say that Fanny Price herself is to be seen as for all intents and purposes a slave. Sense and Sensibility really does challenge the practices and assumptions of primogeniture. And so on. Unfortunately, there is a certain stigma attached to Austen’s works. On the surface, Austen is a sentimental romance novelist who writes about love and relationships and their place within society. Her stories are often perceived as fluff pieces with the romance always prevailing in the end. But beyond that she is so much more. 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.

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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". 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. I'm about halfway through the book, and I'm not sure I'll finish reading. For years, I've thought Jane Austen a feminist, way ahead of her time, and yes, even radical. Kelly is not the first to suggest that Austen's novels are critiques of her times, especially the treatment of women, of others of the gentry who were not eldest sons who inherited wealth and property, and of the plight of the poor. I've loved Austen's novels and read them over and over since I was a teenager, and I am old now. I've long viewed her books as far more than sedate drawing room dramas. 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. 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

But these are minor complaints in an otherwise deeply welcome book. Kelly has produced 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. One might think it is a matter of seeing what one wants to see in a book, but I will warn you that Kelly builds her case based on the texts and family letters and a thorough knowledge of Austen's life, time, and place. It is a characteristic error, because Kelly is incurious about Austen’s fictional methods. The brilliance of the passage from which she quotes is that it is filtered through Anne’s consciousness, mingling her shrewdness with her delusory self-mortification. No novelist had attempted such effects before Austen. Here is her true radicalism: not in her opinions – most of which are unknowable – but in the sheer audacity of her fictional technique.I LOVE this so much. I had the pleasure of having a class with Helena on Jane Austen, where many of the points she brought up in this book were discussed, so I am a bit biased - she introduced me to Clueless AND Bride and Prejudice and was generally awesome, how could I not love her, right?