Her failure to acknowledge the considerable academic literature that has covered this ground before her is unprofessional. Helena Kelly’s publisher got her kicks in early by scheduling the British release of her book last autumn. Kelly may be right, for instance, that the world of Persuasion, Austen’s last completed novel, is one in which old social structures seem to be collapsing and the landed gentry are shown as vain and enervated. Through a deep reading of Jane's novels, Kelly concluded that Jane was a secret radical whose books addressed issues that her first readers would have recognized: slavery, poverty, enclosure, war, feminism, changing societal values, the hypocrisy of the church. It also refers to British wealth from slave plantations in the Caribbean and how the Christian church profited from them.

Kelly was persuasive in many of her arguments, and I admire her gift for finding the unexpected in the familiar (e. One might think it is a matter of seeing what one wants to see in a book, but I will warn you that Kelly builds her case based on the texts and family letters and a thorough knowledge of Austen's life, time, and place. In reality, Austen completely tears society apart with all its ridiculous nuances and expectations of propriety.

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.

When Catherine Morland excitedly unfastens a locked cabinet in Northanger Abbey, Kelly finds something more than a delicious parody of gothic convention. Her eldest brother James, has a slave owning grandfather, James Nibbs, an Oxford acquaintance of the Reverend George Austen” leads to the following footnote: “The biography Claire Tomlin includes this information in an appendix about attitudes to slavery, almost as if she thinks the issue doesn’t really have anything to do with Jane or her writing. So a book that combs through the novels looking for evidence of Austen’s radical heart finds a receptive audience here. Knightly doesn’t actually love Emma, he only wants control over Hartford, so that he can enforce more enclosures of the land. Jane's younger family members grew up in the Victorian Age and tweaked Jane's image to fit the ideal of a pious, quiet, unassuming, Christian woman.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? Her books are stories, often with love in them, that also blatantly criticized the society she lived in.

Radical, by the way, has a bit of a different usage here, in that it mostly means someone who is open to new ideas, and to rejecting the old if that is the right thing to do. It is as if she imagines herself to be the only person who has ever contemplated Jane’s writing before, and the few critics she does acknowledge are swiftly swept aside, sometimes only in a footnote! Kelly's work putting Austen's work into more of a historical and political context than is often found. Another question that I had never asked was why, after the death of Jane’s father, it took her rich brother Edward Knight four years to offer his mother and sisters a permanent home.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. 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. We all love Jane, whether for escapist fantasies or as literary critics, and I think Helena loves Jane too, and so she gives us a different take, a broader scope, in this book, not to rob us of our Darcy/Wentworth/Knightley crushes*, but to give us even more to delight in with Jane, the power to make the rediscovery of her novels as interesting and fun and funny as our first discovery of them. Listening to the excellent Bonnets at Dawn podcast about Mansfield Park inspired me to download this book and read it at last.

These are issues percolating through the book and these are factors that must be considered, of course: class, gender, politics.

I feel like she really gave life to this book, it's one of the "academic" books I've felt the most emotional while reading. Helena's book is very thorough, and ties all the novels together very nicely, tracking Jane's maturation as an author, her developing ideologies. Kelly is powerfully struck by the political content of Austen’s novels, as if she were the very first to stumble on it. I'm not sure I agree with Kelly on any of her basic assertions but reading this book made me want to go back, reread all of Austen's books and look for Kelly's claims while doing so. Mansfield Park is about "The Chain and the Cross," referring to Fanny's amber cross from her brother and the chain gifted her by her cousin Edmund.