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    Jane Austen, the Secret Radical
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    Jane Austen, the Secret Radical
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    Jane Austen, the Secret Radical
    Ebook428 pages6 hours

    Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

    By Helena Kelly

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    ‘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.’ Caroline Criado-Perez, Guardian





    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIcon Books
    Release dateNov 3, 2016
    ISBN9781785781179
    Unavailable
    Jane Austen, the Secret Radical
    Author

    Helena Kelly

    Like Charles Dickens, Helena Kelly grew up in the 'marsh country' of north Kent. She has a doctorate in English literature and used to teach at university but now writes full time. She lives near Oxford with her husband and son.

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    Reviews for Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Kelly shakes our view of Jane up...a lot! Jane's younger family members grew up in the Victorian Age and tweaked Jane's image to fit the ideal of a pious, quiet, unassuming, Christian woman.Through a deep reading of Jane's novels, Kelly concluded that Jane was a secret radical whose books addressed issues that her first readers would have recognized: slavery, poverty, enclosure, war, feminism, changing societal values, the hypocrisy of the church.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.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.""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."In Pride and Prejudice, that sparkling and delightful novel so beloved today, Kelly finds a "revolutionary fairy tale, a fantasy of how, with reform, with radical thinking, society can be safely remodeled" without the revolution that had wracked France.Mansfield Park is about "The Chain and the Cross," referring to Fanny's amber cross from her brother and the chain gifted her by her cousin Edmund. (Inspired by Austen's own amber cross from her sailor brother.) It also refers to British wealth from slave plantations in the Caribbean and how the Christian church profited from them.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.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.After reading this book, you will realize that Jane is not the person you thought you knew.
    • 1/5
      The tone of this one drove me batty and had me Pearl-ruling it with a vengeance. Kelly's argument seems to be that no one understands Jane Austen but her and that you can only understand Austen by closely reading her novels. While it's fair to attempt to gain insight into an author from their books, it's dangerous to extrapolate too much about an author from her works. Also, the book involved a very close reading of the texts, which is fine if you're in the academic market and interested in her argument, but as a general reader (with a Janeite bent) it wasn't what I was hoping for from the book.Plus she insulted Henry Tilney, which I just can't stand for. ;)YMMV.
    • 4/5
      In a series of essays, author Helena Kelly takes a close look at each of Jane Austen's six major novels and analyzes them in the light of the historical context of when they written, doing close readings to determine what Austen 'really meant' when she was writing her stories.This book certainly had some meaty information; the highlights for me were the close reading of certain Austen passages and the depth which Kelly delved into the minutiae of Austen's day to add deeper meaning and context to the worlds occupied in the novels. Where Kelly fails, in my opinion, is in her overemphasis. For instance, Kelly describes the legal concept of enclosures in Austen's England and looks closely at several scenes in Emma that are evidence of how the land in the village is being divided up with shrubs, low fences, etc. This is fascinating and highlights something I completely missed in previous readings of Emma, not having known about this aspect of the history before. However, Kelly is basically claiming the novel is 'all about' enclosures, and that Knightley's interest in Emma must in part be due to getting her estate as well as his own so that he can further his land-owning goals. I ended up re-reading Emma shortly after reading this book, making especial care to look out now for these passages referencing enclosures in any round-about way; it turns out that they are few and far between. If Austen truly wanted to write a novel 'all about' enclosures, I would think she'd have dedicated more space to it than a handful of passages in a 500-page novel. The same goes for the other essays in the book. Kelly picks up a kernel of an idea that's interesting but then runs too far with it. She takes two minor details out of Sense and Sensibility and weaves a wild story about Edward Ferrars's having a past as a sexual predator. Of course, she prefaces everything with an introduction that more or less calls readers stupid if they don't agree with her interpretations. I guess label me -- and all of my Jane Austen reading group -- as stupid because we weren't buying all that she was selling. Again, I think she provided fantastic historical research to contextualize the book and some of her theories were thought-provoking, but she would just take everything a step too far.For me, another pet peeve was that Kelly put in these interludes that would make up what she presumed Austen must have been thinking and feeling at certain moments in her life. It annoys me when biographers insert their own thoughts into their subject's and don't bother to add qualifiers such as "she may have thought," "one can imagine she was feeling," etc. It's particularly interesting here because Kelly basically says we should throw out everything we thought we knew about Austen's life because her family's writings about her were "full of lies" designed to make Austen look more appealing. Sure, it's always worth taking any biography with a grain of salt, but this seems like a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Instead, we're supposed to take Kelly's imaginings of Austen's thoughts as the truths.Overall, I did like that this book got me thinking about the novels in a new light with a greater understanding of the history. However, it seems like Kelly is the one too radical for me.
    • 2/5
      Oh my word. Some people could suck the fun out of a bouncy castle. 'If you want to stay with the novels and the Jane Austen you already know,' Helena Kelly warns in her introduction, 'then you should stop reading now'. Let me tell you, this is no idle threat! If you enjoy Jane Austen's novels and don't have an academic's propensity for finding conspiracy subtexts that aren't there, then run the hell away from this bitter, slightly paranoid 'study' of Austen and her writing!The chapter on Northanger Abbey appears to be about masturbation and dying in childbirth (although the latter inference 'isn't really expressed in the novels', Kelly ponders. 'It's odd.') Sense and Sensibility, while ostensibly a study of primogeniture and inheritance, is actually an excuse to batter the male characters - the first of many, as it turns out. 'Elinor Dashwood marries a man who we know is an unfaithful liar with (perhaps) troubling sexual inclinations' (because Edward nervously chopped up Elinor's scissors case while explaining himself to her, which is obviously Freudian!) And poor Brandon, ' a man whose morality is suspect', 'is happy to enrich himself form the fortune which, morally, ought to belong to his female relations'. Supposing, of course, that his ward is really his daughter, and that Brandon must bear the guilt of his father's decision to marry Eliza off to his elder brother! That's not how I, and I suspect most readers, interpret Colonel Brandon, but then I don't think I know Austen better than Austen knew herself.Pride and Prejudice comes in for less flak because Elizabeth and Darcy are a 'revolutionary fairy tale' and their marriage 'is not unequal'. Also, 'the majority of readers over the past 200 years have tended to agree with the author', who thought that Elizabeth was a 'delightful creature', and obviously Kelly feels the same. Mansfield Park is actually about slavery - well, no shit, Sherlock! I think we were taught that in school. Labouring the point being a speciality, what follows are various ever desperate examples including a word count for 'plantation', 'pheasants' and 'Madeira wine', with the prize going to mention of the 'Moor Park' apricot tree, which is clearly code for African slaves. Oh, also, Edmund is a 'towering hypocrite' and a fool.Emma - wow. I had to steel myself to read this chapter. The historical lesson is about enclosures, all very interesting, but Helena Kelly can't resist adding a good character slur - apparently, Mr Knightley is not only a 'terrible landlord', driving everyone including the gypsies ('The Romani are in the novel for a purpose') into poverty, with his 'zeal for enclosure and improving his land', but he actually only marries Emma so he 'can be certain of pushing the enclosure through'! He's been badgering Mr Woodhouse for years, but to no avail, so he sets his sights on Emma - when she's thirteen of course, and why am I not surprised to find that child-grooming spin in this book? - to basically TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Or enclose all of Highbury, but the sentiment is the same. Also, Harriet is Jane Fairfax's half-sister because she shares the same first name as Miss Bates, despite previous chapters on Austen frequently reusing names. 'Uncomfortable possibilities start to open up,' Kelly intones - only for you!The chapter on Persuasion is best explained with this line - 'From Jane Austen to fossils is, really, just a step'. And instead of being an unfinished novel, published after Austen's death with Northanger Abbey, 'Perhaps we'd do better to view the abrupt shifts, the gaps which open up in the text, as thematic'. Whatever you say! Helena Kelly finishes on a low note, suggesting that Jane Austen was 'killed with kindness', euthanized with a heroin overdose. Hm.I was recommended this book by a former colleague, who is actually more of a Bronte fan, which makes sense. I won't make the same mistake - take the only worthwhile advice from Ms Kelly and just 'Read Jane's novels' instead.