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WORK TITLE: Jane Austen, the Secret Radical
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1981
WEBSITE:
CITY: Oxford, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
http://www.felicitybryan.org.uk/authors-represented-by-sally-holloway/helena-kelly/ * https://www.janeausten.co.uk/an-interview-with-helena-kelly-author-of-jane-austen-the-secret-radical/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1981 in England; married.
EDUCATION:Oxford; King’s College London, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and teacher.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Helena Kelly is a British writer and teacher. She grew up in North Kent, England. Kelly has a Classics degree and a doctorate in English literature, and has attended law school. She studied classics and English at Oxford and King’s College London.
Kelly teaches courses about Jane Austen at an Oxford summer school and for a program for American visiting students in Bath, England. Kelly lives in Oxford with her husband and son.
Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, Kelly’s first book, presents the argument that Jane Austen was a much more radical writer than she has historically been depicted. The book is both a biographical and literary critical assessment, with Kelly pointing to both Austen’s life and her works to defend her claims.
Though there is little known about Austen’s life, Kelly suggests that Austen’s family likely depicted the woman as less politically opinionated that she was. Kelly supports her claims by indicating that modern readers have fallen short in their interpretations of Austen’s intentions in that they have failed to place her work in the historical context of the moment.
Austen was born in 1775, soon after the American Revolution began. Between 1793 and 1815, Britain and France were at war almost continuously, and between 1812 and 1815 Britain was at war with revolting America. While Austen could not participate in the wars, she was present for the totalitarian-like state that was Britain during times of war. This meant heavy censoring of the written word. Publishers of radical political writers were targeted, newspapers were menaced, and nontraditional thinking was viewed with suspicion.
Kelly asserts that, in response to the censorship, Austen hid her political views within her works. Kelly examines Austen’s literary choices, suggesting the writer used the names of people and places, quoted sections of poetry, and etymology, to hide the true messages she intended to express. Kelly cites examples to support this idea. She argues that, through subtle linguistic clues, the reader can see that the hidden message of Emma is a critique of enclosure, or the process in which public land is taken as private property. Similarly, she asserts that slavery, and England’s lack of action against it, is the true focus of Mansfield Park.
Bharat Tandon in Spectator wrote: “Kelly offers a salutary argument for reading Austen’s novels with the serious attentiveness they invite and deserve, but frequently overstates the condition of collective intellectual somnolence from which she’s trying to rescue us.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2017, review of Jane Austen, the Secret Radical.
New Yorker, June 26, 2017, Elisa Gonzalez, “Briefly Noted,” p. 64.
Publishers Weekly, February 13, 2017, review of Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, p. 60.
Spectator, January 28, 2017, Bharat Tandon, “Reading Between the Lines,” p. 40.
Washington Post, June 28, 2017, Ruth Franklin, “Book World: The Secret Radical Behind the Bonnet.”*
Posted on April 10, 2017 by Jenni Waugh
An Interview With Helena Kelly, Author of Jane Austen the Secret Radical
Categories: Histories, Biographies and Non-Fiction, Jane Austen's Books and Characters, Jane Austen's Work, Media Reviews, Press, Regency Biographies, Z-Application
Tags: Helena Kelly, interview, Jane Austen The Secret Radical, Maria Grazia, Review
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Helena Kelly’s book, Jane Austen the Secret Radical, began an interesting debate around the beloved Regency author when it was released in November 2016. Kelly’s book explored Jane Austen as a radical, spirited and politically engaged writer, and this was a shock for
those people who’d only thought of Jane as a tranquil, smiling woman who spent her time penning purely romantic novels.
After receiving a review copy of this brilliant work, and after reading its original analysis, Jane Austen blogger Maria Grazia ended up with a few questions she wanted to ask Helena Kelly. So she wrote them down and was graciously granted the answers. Here’s the interview that resulted.
***
Hello Helena and welcome to our online Jane Austen book club! My first question is … I’ve always thought Jane Austen was rather revolutionary, but now you’ve taken a step ahead of me: a radical?
Hello, and thank you for inviting me! The title Jane Austen the Secret Radical isn’t actually mine, but it is a good choice for the book. I don’t know that Austen wanted to overturn things, but she did want to dig down and examine them, to show people New Jane Austen portraithow they actually worked, and that’s what radicalism is about, isn’t it, getting down to the ‘radix’, the root of things.
I totally agree with you, of course. But when and how exactly did you come to realize her novels are not simply grand houses, balls and dashing heroes?
Much as I loved – and still love – the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice, I was soon introduced to a very different side of Austen. We studied Mansfield Park for A-Level; a novel which has a very un-dashing hero, only one ball, and a heroine who doesn’t end up in the big house. I really struggled with Mansfield Park and I suppose I’ve been trying to bring those two very different sides of Austen into some kind of balance ever since!
This is more a request for confirmation, then a real question. Something I want to discuss with you. I find that Jane Austen’s stubborn wish to write and publish novels is her first political statement and her most revolutionary act as a woman living in that time and that place. Then came her refusal to marry. Weren’t those truly revolutionary acts?
Certainly Austen was stubborn about her writing; hugely stubborn. She had to endure a lot of disappointments – as you probably know, Susan (almost certainly Northanger Abbey) was accepted by a publisher in 1803 but didn’t appear. She wrote to the publishers in 1809, trying to persuade them to publish the novel and her letter is shockingly forceful and really quite aggressive. Jane Austen the Secret Radical begins with her writing that letter. But she was less of a maverick than people often think; she grew up reading quite a number of successful women novelists, several of whom published under their own names. Novel-writing was a reasonably acceptable occupation for women, though (like most female occupations) not highly-valued.
With regards to marriage, there’s not any real evidence for the one-night engagement to Harris Bigg-Wither; the ‘proof’ seems to have been pieced together by a niece who wasn’t even born at the time of the engagement. So it’s possible no one ever proposed to Austen at all!
Would she have married if the right man had come along? Maybe. But she’d seen enough of the dangers of marriage and the demands of endless child-bearing to have made her cautious.
Among the several serious subjects Austen dealt with in her major novels – feminism, slavery, abuse, poverty, power – which is the most revolutionary and dangerous of all in your opinion?
In Mansfield Park Austen doesn’t just confront the subject of slavery, but of the Church of England’s active involvement in slavery. To take the Church to task like this really was incendiary, and it’s no coincidence, I think, that Mansfield Park is the only one of her novels which wasn’t reviewed on publication. In fact, there seems to have been something of a conspiracy of silence about it.
Which is her most revolutionary novel? What about her most radical heroine, instead?
As above, Mansfield Park – it’s profoundly anti-establishment. The heroine Fanny Price, though, embraces Mansfield Park and everything it stands for. I think the most radical heroine is probably Elizabeth Bennet – she who loves to question, to debate, to laugh at power and challenge authority to justify itself.
I know you teach Austen to hundreds of people of all ages, nationalities and backgrounds. What about one or two tips to poor me attempting to teach Austen – among other classics – to the most difficult audience one can expect, I mean teenagers and mostly boys?
My students have been overwhelmingly female and I think even men who do enjoy Austen tend not to come to her until Wentworthsthey’re older. So many people already ‘know’ what they’re going to find in the novels (grand houses, balls, and dashing heroes, as you say above). I’m always a bit hesitant about telling other people how to teach, but since you’ve asked for advice, I reckon start them off with Persuasion, if at all possible – it has some really manly men in it, with all those naval officers and there’s a great adaptation of it starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds which really foregrounds the war. Go for the bits that aren’t at all romantic and work backwards from there. The popular image does get in the way of the text.
May I ask you what you think of the great deal of Jane Austen fan fiction and film adaptations of the recent years? Do they contribute to the popularity of her work or do they contribute to their misinterpretation?
Both! I’m really torn on this question, to be honest.
As I said above, the popular picture of Austen does conceal the text. But many of adaptations and the continuations and sequels and so on are really fun and they make Austen accessible; those aren’t bad things. I’ve just finished reading a book called Lydia by Natasha Farrant which I very much enjoyed and which I think would be a great ‘gateway’ book into the original novels. And then, look at something like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – it’s absurd but at the same time anyone reading it has read a good three-quarters of Austen’s novel. Plus, of course, it makes explicit the sense of external menace in the book, though Austen’s characters are bothered about the French, not the zombie hordes!
But, yes, I suppose I’d like to see less romance, and more of the grittier adaptations, like the 1999 Mansfield Park, directed by Patricia Rozema. The Jane Austen conjured up by the adaptions, etc. doesn’t bear all that much resemblance to the authoress of the novels!
So, in conclusion, why did you feel the need to write your “ Jane Austen The Secret Radical”?
As your readers will know, the Bank of England is about to introduce a new £10 note next year, with Jane Austen on. Except it’s not really Jane Austen. It’s an idealized portrait that was commissioned fifty years after she died, and in the background is a picture of a big house which Austen never actually lived in. It’s such a reductive image of who she was and what her novels are doing that I thought it was time for a corrective!
Helena Kelly holds degrees in Classics and English from Oxford and King’s College London. She teaches Austen at an Oxford summer school, and for a programme for American visiting students in Bath. She has taught Austen to hundreds of people, of all ages, nationalities, and backgrounds. Jane Austen The Secret Radical is her first book.
Helena Kelly
© Mim Saxl Photography, www.mimsaxl.com
Helena Kelly grew up in North Kent, just down the road from where Charles Dickens used to live. Despite this, she’s always been more of a Jane Austen fan. She first read Jane’s novels in her teens and they’ve been her constant companions through a Classics degree, law school, and a doctorate in English literature. She’s written academic articles and set Oxford University finals examinations on them and has taught courses on Austen to hundreds of people, of all ages, nationalities, and backgrounds. Twenty years after she first picked up Pride and Prejudice, she is still discovering new things about her favourite author. She lives in Oxford with her husband and son.
Jane Austen, the Secret Radical (Icon, forthcoming November 2016) is her first book.
Represented by Sally Holloway
Author bio:
Helena Kelly holds degrees in Classics and English from Oxford and King's College London. She teaches Austen at an Oxford summer school, and for a programme for American visiting students in Bath. She has taught Austen to hundreds of people, of all ages, nationalities, and backgrounds. Jane Austen, The Secret Radical is her first book.
Briefly Noted
Elisa Gonzalez
The New Yorker. 93.18 (June 26, 2017): p64.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
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Briefly Noted
Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, by Helena Kelly (Knopf). Do we read Jane Austen's novels as she intended? In this riveting literary-biographical study, the answer is a resounding no. Arguing that Austen wrote under "totalitarian" conditions and was obliged to veil her political messages, Kelly performs an interpretive coup that is dazzling, dizzying, and, occasionally, dubious. "Pride and Prejudice" is a parable of the French Revolution, with Darcy a member of the out-of-touch nobility and Lizzie a radical "constructed to be a conservative's nightmare"; "Mansfield Park" is a referendum on the Church of England and its ties to slavery. Kelly is relentless in pursuing her arguments: no passing detail goes unexamined, and, to her, every word of Austen might be encoded. Whether or not you agree with Kelly's conclusions, you won't read Austen the same way again.
Reading between the lines
Bharat Tandon
Spectator. 333.9831 (Jan. 28, 2017): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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Jane Austen: The Secret Radical
by Helena Kelly
Icon Books, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 328
Writing to her sister Cassandra about Pride and Prejudice in January 1813, Jane Austen declared, in a parody of Walter Scott: 'I do not write for such dull Elves/As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.' That identification of the good Austen reader as one continually on the qui vive, ready to piece out the novels' nudges, winks and silences, also underpins Helena Kelly's ambitiously revisionist new study of Austen --a study that is by turns illuminating, provocative and infuriating. 'We're missing something,' she argues with reference to Northanger Abbey. That sentence, both in its content and in the position it adopts with relation to its readers, could stand as a motto for the whole of the book, both its strengths and its weaknesses. Kelly offers a salutary argument for reading Austen's novels with the serious attentiveness they invite and deserve, but frequently overstates the condition of collective intellectual somnolence from which she's trying to rescue us.
Austen's works are particularly fitted for the kind of treatment that Kelly gives them, since, when set alongside many later 19th-century novels, they might appear comparatively light on direct historical and political references: the Jacobite rebellions and Chartist agitations that feature in Scott and Gaskell are noticeable by their absence. However, Austen criticism has long since ceased to treat these absences as signs that the novels are uninterested in the upheavals of the times in which they take place; rather, these are texts that trust their original readers to pick up on the ways in which the most oblique glance at the world beyond the fiction --a volume of Cowper, say, or a bottle of Madeira--can let much larger cultural stories into the frame.
So far so good, and the strongest parts of Kelly's study come in her eagle-eyed revisitings of the novels. Picking up on the fact that Northanger Abbey 'offers us no fewer than three bedroom scenes, all of them lengthy', she suggests that the true horrors lurking in the novel's margins may be the potentially mortal risks of sexuality and childbirth ('Catherine might learn to value a library more for the medicines it sells--Balm of Gilead, the "female pills" that promise to "restore" the menstrual cycle--than the mere novels').
Likewise, Kelly takes the prominence of the word 'prejudice' in Pride and Prejudice --a word which would, indeed, have carried a particular charge for readers familiar with Edmund Burke and William Godwin after the 1790s--as her cue to explore an 'upstart' ascendancy challenging the established ranks in the novel:
Elizabeth's dutifulness as a daughter ... her
lack of respect for Lady Catherine de Bourgh,
they're all of a piece. Elizabeth is, in short,
constructed to be a conservative's nightmare.
It is a mark of Kelly's achievement here that her readings are pertinent even if one doesn't wholly agree with them, since anything that sends a reader back to the detail of a novel in such a spirit is to be welcomed.
However, this is not the only mode in which the book works. For one thing, Kelly's chapters begin with vignettes of biographically derived fiction which look back to Peter Ackroyd's Dickens and, more directly, to David Nokes's 1997 Jane Austen. It's a legitimate move, but it's hard to see how much it contributes to the overall effect of this book. Moreover, we are also given those moments which fictionalise acts of creation and inspiration ('She pours ink into her inkwell, spilling out the letters of her name'), which always resemble the cliche in rock biopics when someone happens to stumble upon the melody of the band's 'greatest hit'.
The real problem, though, is the remit which Kelly's book claims for itself. For sure, this is a study which pitches itself to a broad, non-specialist readership; but the tone of Jane Austen: The Secret Radical often implies that its insights are more 'radical' than they really are. A good measure of this is the work the pronoun 'we' is made to do. 'We know wrong'; 'we all know that Pride and Prejudice is a happy cheerful book'. There's a historical elasticity to the way in which 'we' works in Kelly's prose, with the result that it's not always certain whether the interpretative infelicities she diagnoses are the fault of the present 'we' or of all misguided Austen critics until now.
Kelly's obvious culprits are the agents of the Austen industry, that heritage-industrial complex which transfigures radical art into tea towels and novelty mugs, but it is not obvious how her grievance is only a modern one. 'Her books are, as she meant them to be, read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people she disliked': those aren't the words of a clever modern critic, but of D. W. Harding writing in Scrutiny in 1940, and this gets to the heart of the problem with the rhetorical force of 'we' in Kelly's argument. The whole complex history of Austen's modern reception (in which she has frequently been claimed as a not-so-secret radical, not least by the suffragettes) is compressed into a naive 'we', ripe for deliverance from all the old illusions, even if those illusions are no longer prevalent.
In this light, it is appropriate that Kelly should reserve so much of her anger for adaptations that get in the way of the original texts. After reading this book, I certainly wasn't thinking about Austen films, yet I did have another cinematic image lurking all too prominently in my mind: that of Morpheus offering Neo the red pill in The Matrix. 'If you want to stay with the novels and the Jane Austen you know, then you should stop reading now. If you want to read Jane as she wanted to be read ... read on.' A study which offers such smart close observation of Austen should not have so insistently to tell its readers to 'Wake up, sheeple'.
Book Wolrld: The secret radical behind the bonnet
Ruth Franklin
The Washington Post. (June 28, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
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Byline: Ruth Franklin
Jane Austen: The Secret Radical
By Helena Kelly
Knopf. 318 pp. $27.95
---
Jane Austen's face - demure, bonneted, with a few stray curls over her forehead - peers out pensively from the new British 10-pound note, debuting this fall to mark the bicentenary of her death. The bill superimposes her image over a stately mansion surrounded by vast gardens, with a horse and carriage in the foreground. The quotation below comes from "Pride and Prejudice": "I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!"
This is the Jane Austen we think we know: conventional, proper, unthreatening, writes Oxford professor Helena Kelly in "Jane Austen, the Secret Radical," her new critical reassessment of the author. In fact, all the standard tropes about her are wrong, or at least misleading. The iconic image from the BBC remake of "Pride and Prejudice" - Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy emerging, dripping wet, from the lake at Pemberley - exists nowhere in the novel. What little we know of Austen's biography is likely to be false, tainted by the desires of her family to make her appear both less serious about her writing and less political than she really was. Even the quote that appears on the 10-pound note should be understood ironically: It's spoken by a character who only pretends to be reading to impress a man. As soon as she's said it, she throws her book aside.
Kelly argues - passionately and engagingly, if not always convincingly - that modern readers have failed to read Austen as she was meant to be read: in the context of her historical moment. She was born in 1775, just after the American Revolution began, and died at the tragically young age of 41, after an illness. (Kelly suggests that her death may have been hastened by a doctor who gave her a hefty dose of laudanum, a standard treatment at the time.) Britain and France were at war almost without a break from 1793 until 1815 - the period when Austen was probably writing her novels, which were published between 1811 and 1817. Between 1812 and 1815, Britain was also at war with America, the colony that had newly revolted.
Wartime Britain was a totalitarian state, Kelly writes, "with the unpleasant habits" that such states exhibit, particularly regarding intellectual life. Formerly innocuous lines of thinking were newly defined as treasonous; the publishers of radical political writers were prosecuted; booksellers and newspapers were threatened; letters were censored. The aim was "to terrify writers and publishers into policing themselves." Some, like Sir Walter Scott, took refuge in historical or foreign settings. Indeed, Austen was the only novelist of her period to set her work "more or less in the present day and more or less in the real world," even depicting her characters walking on actual streets. In so doing, she offered trenchant commentary on the social and political issues of the day. But like writers in communist Eastern Europe, Kelly argues, she wrote in a kind of code, "anticipating that her readers would understand how to read between the lines. ... The trick was never to be too explicit, too obvious."
Kelly's task, as she sees it, is to decode Austen, revealing her as the "secret radical" she truly was. Her critical method is to focus microscopically, generating meaning from the smallest details of the novels - names of people and places, lines of poetry quoted, the etymology of words - juxtaposed with historical context. In a probing reading of "Mansfield Park," for instance, Kelly traces a long strand of allusions and associations to argue that slavery - specifically, the Church of England's complicity in it - is the backbone of the novel. (This isn't a new reading; Paula Byrne, drawing on the work of other scholars, makes a very similar case in "The Real Jane Austen," her 2013 biographical study.) Similarly, Kelly argues that the newly introduced system of enclosure, by which land formerly accessible to the public was restricted as private property, is the hidden focus of "Emma."
It's no secret to any observant reader that Austen frequently drew on her social and political context, usually to critique it. The Bennets in "Pride and Prejudice" refer over and over to the tyranny of the "entail" on their estate - the law requiring that it be handed over to a distant male relative rather than inherited by a daughter. But it doesn't necessarily follow that Austen meant for that novel to be understood as "a revolutionary fairy tale, a fantasy of how, with reform ... society can be safely remodeled." In fact, it detracts from Austen's enormous artistry to say she did. To perceive her "courtship plots" as fluff is to underestimate her work. As Kelly herself acknowledges, "Marriage mattered because it was the defining action of a woman's life; to accept or refuse a proposal was almost the only decision a woman could make for herself."
Through her extraordinary psychological insight, brilliant characterizations, deft command of satire and humor, and - indeed - political astuteness, Austen spun her "courtship plots" into complex investigations of human nature, as well as of social inequality, financial dependency and other pressing issues of her time. To discover that doesn't require complex decoding - merely thoughtful reading. We don't have to subscribe to Kelly's vision of Austen as a political revolutionary to understand her as a radical, though not a secret one. That her novels prioritized the true circumstances for women in her era is radical enough.
---
Franklin's most recent book is "Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life," winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography in 2016.
Kelly, Helena: JANE AUSTEN, THE SECRET
RADICAL
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kelly, Helena JANE AUSTEN, THE SECRET RADICAL Knopf (Adult Nonfiction) $28.95 5, 2 ISBN: 978-1-5247-
3210-3
Tracking the "shadowy, curiously colorless figure" of the revered novelist.In her debut book, a fine-grained literary
study, Kelly (Classics and English Literature/Univ. of Oxford) amply shows her deep research into some of the lesserknown
elements of Austen's life and work. The author's close attention to the period's history supports her assertion
that her subject was a radical. Austen's readers must remember that during her lifetime, England was at war with
France and was essentially a totalitarian state; habeas corpus was suspended, and treason was redefined in the strictest
and most frightening terms. At the time, Austen was one of the only novelists to consider current events in her work.
She never resorted to grand heroes or wicked villains, dealing instead with society's ills--not least of all women's rights,
which were nearly nonexistent. In Sense and Sensibility, Austen alludes to Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman and decries women's reliance on the kindness of relatives to provide for them. Slavery, especially as
dealt with in Mansfield Park, receives the full Austen treatment with quotations from abolitionist writers, subtle
character names, and mind manipulation. However, slavery was not Austen's only target. Also in Mansfield, the author
attacks the Church of England for enclosures of common land, pluralism, and outright ownership of slaves. In both
Emma and Pride and Prejudice, Austen challenges the then-strict societal norms, particularly regarding introductions.
Elizabeth Bennett shows her radicalism, deciding things for herself and tolerating authority only as far as it suits her. In
dissecting Austen's feelings on parents, especially fathers, sexuality, and 19th-century life, Kelly exposes a depth
beyond what at first may seem to be silly characters. A fine-grained study that shows us how to read between the lines
to discover the remarkable woman who helped transform the novel from trash to an absolute art form.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Kelly, Helena: JANE AUSTEN, THE SECRET RADICAL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482911790&it=r&asid=a2d0f19e7422d829ad6b51307fb75605.
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Jane Austen, The Secret Radical
Publishers Weekly.
264.7 (Feb. 13, 2017): p60.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Jane Austen, The Secret Radical
Helena Kelly. Knopf, $28.95 (336p) ISBN 978-1-5247-3210-3
Kelly, an Oxford lecturer, enters the busy Jane Austen industry on a path already hewn but not overly traveled: the
argument that Austen encoded radical beliefs into her famously well-mannered novels. This route into Austen deserves
more attention, but Kelly's book, despite offering interesting tidbits, meanders in too many directions. Kelly shows a
solid knowledge of Regency history, but her larger point is unclear. A fundamental flaw lies in the fuzziness around
Kelly's use of "radical" (she defines it as "questioning unexplored assumptions"). She brings up contemporary political
issues, such as Britain's slave trade, but also suggests that Pride and Prejudice is a "revolutionary novel" because it
doesn't convey "unthinking respect for the nobility"--which can be said of many English novels of the time. Kelly also
makes the questionable decision to open each chapter with a fictionalized "sweet" vignette about Austen's life. A reader
might wonder whether Kelly considers Austen a serious radical or, as in one segment, a silly child-woman "giggling"
as she "skips." This book, written with airy nonchalance, seems to hope to cater to multiple Austen constituencies but is
likely to end up pleasing few. Agent: George Lucas, InkWell. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Jane Austen, The Secret Radical." Publishers Weekly, 13 Feb. 2017, p. 60+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482198197&it=r&asid=73f830385b3f17b03fdb676d82a03be4.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482198197