Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

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There's plenty of context, but the method and manner in which Kelly sets about "radicalising" Austen means ignoring all of the work on Austen that came before. 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. When the contrast is drawn between the noble Lady Catherine’s behaviour and Elizabeth Bennet’s aunt and uncle, the Gardiners, who are in trade, the reader’s conclusion is inevitable: good breeding has nothing to do with titles. There was some interesting background info on the social issues of the time, but I did not agree with all the conclusions drawn.

She also didn't focus very well on one topic and would start talking about another book in a chapter that was supposed to focused on a particular one. Misinterpretation, or reading our modern sensibilities and modern knowledge onto Jane, is very common. These lead us into chapter-by-chapter treatment of each of the novels, revealing the importance of money in Sense and Sensibility, or the activities of the militia in Pride and Prejudice, or the possible effect of enclosures in Emma. The chapter about Emma was all right, but the subject of enclosure just isn't as interesting to me as it seems to have been to Kelly. 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.When Kelly is discussing Willoughby’s visit to the Dashwoods in Sense and Sensibility when he believes Marianne to be dying, Kelly states that Willoughby “turns up at what he thinks is Marianne’s death-bed intoxicated (‘yes, I am very drunk’)”(3), quoting Willoughby’s own words. 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. Austen was unique as a novelist of this period in writing “novels which were set more or less in the present day, and more or less in the real world”. 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. There's really no need to panic if it turns out that Austen might have been a conservative and a snob and a product of her social environment and class.

But surely it was not Exeter where Edward was educated but at Longstaple near Plymouth at the house of Lucy Steele’s uncle, Mr Pratt? 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.Having warned the reader about how little is known about Jane and her intentions, she then spends the remainder of the book second-guessing authorial intent and inserting fictionalised scenes of Jane's life that might have prompted her novels. 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.