Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

Product Information

I love Jane Austen’s novels and I know something of Jane’s life and period. I certainly ought to, as one chapter in my new book ( What Regency Women Did For Us) is given over to my favourite author! However, I am not a literary critic and have never sought to pull Jane Austen’s novels to pieces in search for greater meaning. I accepted this review copy on the basis that it promised new insights into the novels through greater knowledge of the period in which Jane Austen wrote. As a Regency historian, I decided to hear what Kelly had to say. 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. Many of the negative reviewers seem to believe they are being individually condescended to by Helena's assertion that they've read Jane wrong. Come on, no. You may perfectly well have noticed the occurrence of Stuart names in Persuasion or the hypocrisy of Edmund Bertram, but can you deny that the popular conception of Jane's books - the adaptations, what we're meant to understand by calling someone a Janeite - is simplistic in comparison to what she actually wrote? Of course, in a point-by-point rundown of misconceptions surrounding Jane's books, relating to the political climate of the time, books Jane had read, etc., obviously someone familiar with the 18th century British literary culture will be aware of some of them, but of all of them? I really feel Helena does provide plenty of information I hadn't previously considered at all, there ARE secrets that I, someone pretty darn interested in Jane, was surprised to read from Helena. 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?

Both! I’m really torn on this question, to be honest. As I said above, the popular picture of Austen does conceal the text. But many of adaptations and the continuations and sequels and so on are really fun and they make Austen accessible; those aren’t bad things. I’ve just finished reading a book called Lydia by Natasha Farrant which I very much enjoyed and which I think would be a great ‘gateway’ book into the original novels. And then, look at something like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – it’s absurd but at the same time anyone reading it has read a good three-quarters of Austen’s novel. Plus, of course, it makes explicit the sense of external menace in the book, though Austen’s characters are bothered about the French, not the zombie hordes! But, yes, I suppose I’d like to see less romance, and more of the grittier adaptations, like the 1999 Mansfield Park , directed by Patricia Rozema. The Jane Austen conjured up by the adaptions, etc. doesn’t bear all that much resemblance to the authoress of the novels! 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. Sometimes, we don’t even skim as far as that, content to revel at the level of what Kelly calls “the unknown knowns – things we don’t actually know, but think we do.” The things we think we know about Austen based on countless twee tea towels and throbbing film adaptations, the things an audience member was presumably thinking of when she stood up at a Margaret Atwood event I attended recently and thanked the author for “saving me from having to read Jane Austen”. She hasn’t read Jane Austen. But she knows her, as indeed we all do. Well, as Kelly says: “We know wrong.” We have to try a little harder. After all, in a letter to her sister Austen herself explains: “I do not write for such dull Elves As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.” 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!

Read about Caroline of Brunswick

As above, Mansfield Park – it’s profoundly anti-establishment. The heroine Fanny Price, though, embraces Mansfield Park and everything it stands for. I think the most radical heroine is probably Elizabeth Bennet – she who loves to question, to debate, to laugh at power and challenge authority to justify itself. There is no way that an educated woman like Jane Austen could have been unaware of this. Of course she wasn’t, and her awareness is in all her books – if you look for it. 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. 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. 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.

Despite being one of the most written about English writers, Jane Austen (1775–1817) continues to attract researchers. Kelly (classics & English literature, Univ. of Oxford) asserts that we have been misunderstanding Austen's novels for the last 200 years and that close reading will expose her economic and political views, considered radical for the early 1800s. Devoting a chapter to each novel, Kelly focuses on the dangers of military camps in Pride and Prejudice, the importance of money in Sense and Sensibility, and the effects of the Enclosure Movement in Emma. While these observations are valid, they are not new. Scholars have before mentioned these connections, such as the changing social mores in Persuasion, and the association between Mansfield Park's Mrs. Norris and Robert Norris, a slavery supporter. At times Kelly stretches believability, such as describing Edward's episode with the scissors as having an explicit sexual meaning in Sense and Sensibility. Nonetheless, through meticulous research, she succeeds in capturing the historical and literary context of Austen's output, which should enhance the reading of her work. VERDICT Austen scholars and fans, even if they do not agree with all of the conclusions, will be interested in this book.—Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo Library Journal But there are downsides. The structure of the book is peculiar, and designed to give fodder for those looking to disparage. Each chapter opens with a little speculative vignette from inside Austen’s head, supposed to give us insight into what she was thinking about at the time she composed each novel. Right there, Kelly is going to lose just about every serious Austen scholar. She claims rigor in basing biographical information on known fact instead of family tradition (and readers of the biographies would do well to be cautious about family traditions regarding Austen’s life and works) but she does not extend the same rigor to her readings of the novels—there are several unforced errors here. Also, she gives no indication that she has read much literary criticism of Austen’s work, which allows critics to dismiss her as a lightweight. The publicists didn’t help by branding the book as revolutionary; many of its ideas can be found in that neglected body of scholarship. And she has a tendency to get overly enthusiastic and take her arguments beyond a reasonable point (especially when they are tainted with Freudian nonsense). In several chapters she mistakes the context of a novel for the central point of the novel. Points that were initially interesting sometimes devolve into the ridiculous.

Blog Archive

Jane Austen, the Secret Radical made me rethink my relationship to Jane's work - and this considering I spent an entire semester in a Jane Austen seminar with Helena - which I think is the book's stated intention, so in this it was resoundingly successful for me. Fanny Price’s father physically/sexually(?) assaulted his children, thus Fanny’s sister’s arguing over the little silver knife, which they used as protection against him

Ambitious . . . illuminating, provocative. . . . Kelly offers a salutary argument for reading Austen’s novels with the serious attentiveness they invite and deserve.”— The Spectator This is a strange book and (sorry) a ludicrous one. There's plenty of context, but the method and manner in which Kelly sets about "radicalising" Austen means ignoring all of the work on Austen that came before. Like, Emma is not "about" enclosures and Mr. Knightley is not simply a kind of Marie Antoinette. These are issues percolating through the book and these are factors that must be considered, of course: class, gender, politics. Doing so makes for fruitful reading. But this is a book of wilful misreading. Instead of seeing how class relations inform social relationships and character, Kelly wants to see Emma (or the other novels) as being specifically about Austen's radical politics as determined solely by Kelly and Kelly herself. It's a weird way to read a book. 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. Furthermore, the snarkiness and disrespect to other critics and Janeites was insane. For example, one passage in the book: ”Slavery wasn’t some distant, abstract notice for Jane. Her own family has ties to the Caribbean. Her eldest brother James, has a slave owning grandfather, James Nibbs, an Oxford acquaintance of the Reverend George Austen” leads to the following footnote: “The biography Claire Tomlin includes this information in an appendix about attitudes to slavery, almost as if she thinks the issue doesn’t really have anything to do with Jane or her writing.”Mansfield Park has always seemed a more serious book to me than Jane’s other novels, but I had not made the connection between the names used in the book and the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade. The very name of the book – Mansfield – links the book to Lord Mansfield whose judgement ‘removed the practical basis’(2) on which slavery rested, and the hated Mrs Norris shares her name with a notorious slave trader. 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. From John Mullan's review of the book( https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...) from the Guardian:

I found this book to be frustrating for a couple of reasons, mostly for the way that Kelly constantly acts like she is the first person to ever imply that Austen's writing was subversive and radical. Most people who are fans of Austen (and thus are interested in reading this kind of book about her) are already aware that nearly all her books are heavily critical of the society she lived in; today, her reputation is essentially as a feminist writer. As somebody who personally is a fan of Austen from an academic perspective AND loves most of the movies, I resent the idea that just because a person enjoys the romantic elements of Austen that they are apparently too dumb to notice all the political nuances of her novels. Newsflash: her feminist and radical elements are part of her appeal. There are many more comments I could make on this book which, in my opinion, was a mixed bag of fascinating insights and unhelpful suggestions that I could have done without. You may discover some real gems that take you closer to Jane’s world, but if you love Jane’s novels as the love stories they are, then you might not want to take the risk! 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.

Andrew & Rachel Knowles

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. Austen was writing at a time of intense political turmoil. Threats from abroad (wars with France and America; the French Revolution) made for a country on alert for threats from within, where “any criticism of the status quo was seen as disloyal and dangerous”. Britain became “more and more like a totalitarian state, with all the unpleasant habits totalitarian states acquire”. Habeas corpus was suspended; the meaning of treason was expanded to include “thinking, writing, printing, reading”. Kelly tells us of carpenters imprisoned for reciting doggerel and schoolmasters imprisoned for distributing leaflets. “There can hardly have been a thinking person in Britain who didn’t understand what was intended – to terrify writers and publishers into policing themselves.” However, I found little sympathy with Kelly when she began trying to read sexual meanings into Edward Ferrars’ behaviour and implied he was no better than Willoughby. It certainly does not help me enjoy the novel better. Edward might not be a Darcy, but he is a man who has been downtrodden by his mother, and if Eleanor loves him, who are we to question her choice? Despite what Kelly suggests, I retain my right to believe that Edward and Eleanor could live happily ever after.