Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

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Kelly's work putting Austen's work into more of a historical and political context than is often found. 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.

The year 2016 belonged to Shakespeare; 2017 is Jane Austen’s, the 200th anniversary of her premature death. She shows us that despite those who “stubbornly insist that despite using the word enclosure, Jane doesn’t really mean it”, at least two of Austen’s novels ( Mansfield Park and Emma) were engaged with the effects of the Enclosure Acts and their attendant dangers of poverty and misery. 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. Other Austen fans might feel differently as this is certainly very well written and contains much that is of interest - but eventually I just lost the will to finish it I'm afraid.It was not, as Kelly asserts, a simple matter of the Bank of England celebrating the bicentenary of Austen’s death. Jane's (sic) novels, in truth, (rhetorical device) are as revolutionary, at their heart, (if you, like me, are clever enough to be able to see it.

Also, the idea that JA is some secret radical is pretty unoriginal (although according to her tone, you wouldn't know that), and the author's attitude of "there's so much Austen criticism out there, but I don't need to touch it" was insulting. 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. 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.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.

The book takes place in a brief moment of peace with France, just before Napoleon escapes from Elba. 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”.In Northanger Abbey, published after Austen's death and years too late for the audience it was intended for--readers who were well versed in the Gothic novel of the 1790s--Kelly sees "The Anxieties of Common Life.

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 book is split up into sections following each of her published novels, as well as one concerning her life, and her death. It seems improbable that, however clear-sighted an interpreter she is, Kelly is the first to see what the great novelist was really up to.Although I have read The Mysteries of Udolpho, I can’t say I know it very well, therefore I appreciated Kelly pointing out that the links between Mrs Radcliffe’s Gothic novel and Northanger Abbey were much stronger than I had realised.