Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

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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. Yet every self-respecting introduction to every paperback edition of the novel has always pointed this out. Kelly argues that Jane’s novels are much more than love stories – they are revolutionary and tackle subjects which would have been seen as highly controversial at the time they were written. Of the many such far fetchings, the following can be cited — from “Mansfield Park” — when Fanny is sent back to her family in Portsmouth to mend her ways. Wickham is Darcy and Georgiana’s half-brother, and he was never trying to marry her, just trying get in good with the family.

Yes it is true that it's impossible to read a book in the same way as it was read at the time of its publication after two centuries, and the background information the author provides is always interesting, but the claims that Austen chose the names of her heroines in Persuasion as a veiled critique of the Hannoverian succession, or that the apricot tree mentioned by Mrs Norris is a hidden reference to the Church of England's ties to the slave trade, are franky ridiculous. Contrary to Churchill’s infamous assertion that her characters led “calm lives” free from worry “about the French Revolution or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars”, Kelly reveals an oeuvre steeped in the anxiety and fear of war.Unsurprisingly, despite some great historical context concerning slavery, Mansfield Park was one of the weaker ones, as even Kelly (who studies Austen for her job) seems unable to come up with a unifying theory for that book. 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.

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. An earl is indeed the third highest title in the British peerage after duke and marquess as Kelly states, but whilst there were less than 20 English dukedoms and a similar number of marquessates at the start of the Regency, there were decidedly more than ‘a handful’ of earls. 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. Kelly's work putting Austen's work into more of a historical and political context than is often found.

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. She is good on how the grim facts of a small-town economy are intimated in Emma, signalling the relative deprivation of many, from the poor cottagers to whom Emma dispenses charity, to the Gypsies who menace Harriet Smith, to the Bateses, just clinging to gentility. 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.

Understand what a serious subject marriage was then, how important it was, and all of a sudden courtship plots start to seem like a more suitable vehicle for discussing other serious things. Anyone who has seriously read Austen knows that's bunk, and that she was a very smart woman who wrote with care to her craft, and who packed a wallop of a biting undertone if you were really paying attention. Sex caused pregnancy, and death was just as much a part of pregnancy as ending up with a baby at the end.

At the very least, she found the verities of class structure and institutional religion problematic and often mockworthy. I listened to this book on audio, which is usually a medium that I have trouble maintaining attention, but this book failed to disappoint. Kelly does not seem to have read any of the many Austen scholars and critics who would have shown her that some of her discoveries are not quite unprecedented. While Kelly is making her claims about the subtexts that have evaded previous critics, Austen admirers will keep noticing little mistakes about what is going on in the novels.