Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

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The background is a stately home “where Jane didn’t live” and the selected quotation – “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! 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. I'm not sure I agree with Kelly on any of her basic assertions but reading this book made me want to go back, reread all of Austen's books and look for Kelly's claims while doing so.

Her failure to acknowledge the considerable academic literature that has covered this ground before her is unprofessional. I would hope that these vulnerabilities would not discourage too many readers, however, because there is much of value here.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. We all love Jane, whether for escapist fantasies or as literary critics, and I think Helena loves Jane too, and so she gives us a different take, a broader scope, in this book, not to rob us of our Darcy/Wentworth/Knightley crushes*, but to give us even more to delight in with Jane, the power to make the rediscovery of her novels as interesting and fun and funny as our first discovery of them. 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. And that is before we even get on to the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth that were implicit in any marriage plot at a time where “almost every family had a tale of maternal death to tell”.

Generally speaking, we view sex as an enjoyable recreational activity; we have access to reliable contraception; we have very low rates of maternal and infant mortality. I loved this one too much to speak intelligently about it, though I loved the bit about the hazelnut. What should we make,” Kelly continues, “of the fact that Fanny’s two sisters fight over possession of a silver knife and that one of Fanny’s first actions after arriving back in Portsmouth is to make sure they each have one?This was a very interesting read and I absolutely sped through it - surprising for a work of literary criticism!