Right there, Kelly is going to lose just about every serious Austen scholar. 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. The structure of the book is peculiar, and designed to give fodder for those looking to disparage.
Kelly was persuasive in many of her arguments, and I admire her gift for finding the unexpected in the familiar (e.g., her discussion of Austen’s obituaries and speculations about how she came to be buried in Winchester Cathedral was fascinating).īut there are downsides. For example, it had not occurred to me to look at Emma through the lens of the enclosure controversy, or Persuasion in the context of the kinds of doubts that arise when people start to encounter the logic of evolution. So a book that combs through the novels looking for evidence of Austen’s radical heart finds a receptive audience here.Īnd I found plenty of insight in Kelly’s surveys of the novels to intrigue me. At the very least, she found the verities of class structure and institutional religion problematic and often mockworthy. I am also a reader who finds many hints in Austen’s novels that she was not a conservative upholder of the established Church and established social order, contrary to the arguments of her family members and scholars such as Marilyn Butler. Despite leading a private, mostly rural life, Austen was well informed and lived in a family that read and thought widely, a family that argued ideas over the dinner table. Its claims are worth debating at least.Īs one who has never considered Austen a writer of romances or even a Romantic (in the sense of the literary movement of the early nineteenth century), I am predisposed to like any book that aims to situate the novels in the philosophical and ideological debates of her day. Still, Austen scholars are few and Austen fans are legion, so this book, pitched as it is for the general reader, arguably has a place. Austen scholars, by contrast, will find less that is new or surprising, along with some ideas that are overstated or simply odd.
If the “we” envisioned here means fans who have come to Jane Austen through the filmed adaptations and other popular-culture manifestations, those publicists are doubtless correct. The publicists of Helena Kelly’s Jane Austen: The Secret Radical would have us believe that the book is itself a radical document-an upending of all we “know” about Jane Austen.
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