Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

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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.

Helena's book is very thorough, and ties all the novels together very nicely, tracking Jane's maturation as an author, her developing ideologies. It made me realize the very thorough work that went into this book, as well as her gift for close reading. But many or most of her readers also need to be alive to the fact that she’s more than that, and Kelly’s book—even when you might disagree with it or laugh at the overreaches—will help you get there. Perhaps I just fundamentally disagree with the main idea of the book - yes it is important to raise Austen's profile beyond just the author of empty regency fluff, but shouldn't we do that by overcoming the stigma attached to women's writing and acknowledging that she's a phenomenal observer of her corner of English middle-class life, rather than trying to shoehorn "manly" debates about revolutions and parliamentary reforms into her work?Fortunately, Kelly does not try to undermine the characters of Darcy and Elizabeth, but rather draws attention to the underlying prejudices of the novel which are far more revolutionary than a modern audience appreciates.

I learned a lot, I saw Austen with fresh eyes, and that’s a lot for me to say after a lifetime of immersion. In the chapter on Sense and Sensibility, Kelly suggests that Jane was indirectly criticising the men in her family for failing to provide adequately for the women who were dependent on them – Jane, her sister Cassandra, and their mother.Kelly illuminates the radical subjects--slavery, poverty, feminism, the Church, evolution, among them--considered treasonous at the time, that Austen deftly explored in the six novels that have come to embody an age. I laugh out loud when I read Austen because I hear the words of an angry women lashing back at the stuffy society in which she existed. To me this just undermined the many good points that the book was making and eventually it frustrated me to the point where I just didn't want to continue. 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. A very careful reader in Austen’s own day might have picked up on many of the hints Kelly highlights, but it’s pretty astonishing that a twenty-first-century reader could do so.