Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

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wasn't the whole project of the book to get Austen away from the romanticising gaze of her later critics and reaffirm her as an intelligent, self-aware person who was so much more than a sad little spinster who lived solely through her books? The author reveals just how in the novels we find the real Jane Austen: a clever, clear-sighted woman "of information," fully aware of what was going on in the world and sure about what she thought of it. Wickham is Darcy and Georgiana’s half-brother, and he was never trying to marry her, just trying get in good with the family. Her books are stories, often with love in them, that also blatantly criticized the society she lived in.

Later in the book, Kelly talks about how Jane includes a character in Mansfield Park who was blessed with ten healthy pregnancies, just as Jane's sister-in-law was at the time of Jane's writing, but who would later die of her eleventh. The marriage plot is for Austen a Trojan horse, infiltrating her ideas into the reader’s consciousness without our fully realizing it. someone has carefully followed the teaching instructions of writing to persuade GCSE English circa 2010; repetition (tick), alliteration (tick), rule of three (tick). The Northanger Abbey chapter was insightful about the use of the Gothic within that text, if I ever get around to actually reading the Mysteries of Udolpho, I intend to read both NA and the chapter here again. 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.Each of these chapters begins with a fictional section based on one of Jane’s letters which helped set the theme for the chapter. It is a shame that Kelly doesn’t leave much room for Austen’s bitingly funny letters and juvenilia, both of which can leave no reader in doubt of Austen’s disposition toward the satirical, the radical and, more often than not, the grotesque.

obviously someone familiar with the 18th century British literary culture will be aware of some of them, but of all of them? Could Lady Catherine really be a sensible person to appoint Mr Collins to the living at her disposal and then actually welcome his irksome company? Marriage as Jane knew it involved a woman giving up everything to her husband—her money, her body, her very existence as a legal adult. Despite what Kelly suggests, I retain my right to believe that Edward and Eleanor could live happily ever after.The point readers have traditionally assumed is that the girls have yet to learn the moral self-control Fanny has acquired at Mansfield Park, not that they are prepared (armed by Fanny) to slit their father’s throat. 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. 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. 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. Helena Kelly’s publisher got her kicks in early by scheduling the British release of her book last autumn.

There are far too many outrageous one-liners that argue wild points without any solid evidence or explanation.

But it's fun to consider new perspectives, and in balance, I got so much more from this book that I'm going to take with me than I will ignore. 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. There has been, and will be, a spate of commemorative events, festivals and, of course, books like this. They saw her books as instructional, beneficial even, for women readers of the age, for those who “needed” to learn to behave.

Marriage as Jane knew it involved a woman giving up everything to her husband – her money, her body, her very existence as a legal adult. She says that Willoughby is drunk when he turns up at what he fears is Marianne’s deathbed in Sense and Sensibility, but in fact his “Yes, I am very drunk” is entirely sarcastic. 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. She contests that the timing of the publication of Austen’s works have changed the way the novels were read, the arguments that Austen was sneaking in commentaries on slavery and enclosure are weak- filled with much historical context but little substance from Austen’s novels other than character names, setting references and short lines of dialogue.It felt like she was working too hard to make Jane Austen's works fit the "secret radical" image, choosing the most cynical, negative interpretations possible. According to Debrett’s, there were about 90 English earldoms alone at the start of the Regency – a very large handful!