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A review by losthitsu
Jane Austen, the Secret Radical by Helena Kelly
3.0
Good things first: I have a lot of respect and admiration for the amount of research that went into this book and I appreciate the author highlighting that some of the well known "facts" about Austen's life are nothing more than family traditions and have no root in actual primary sources. However, a lot of the conclusions the book is presenting as groundbreaking revelations are simply too far-fetched to be in any way believable. 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. Yes, Austen was an author remarkably well tuned to her time and yes her books are far more radical than many of the works of her contemporaries, but a lot of Kelly's claims just sound like very arduously constructed wishful thinking. Part of the problem is the artificial attempt to divide the topic by book and by subject, and claim that every book had one main social criticism secretly incorporated in its pages - sorry I just don't buy that.
I don't agree with a lot of the author's reading of the books and her character interpretation (I don't like Fanny's father either but calling him a sadist based on one offhand remark is a bit steep) but I understand that books are open to an infinite number of interpretations. What I hated however were those horrid little "authentic" vignettes that open each chapter, where the author writes about moments from Austen's life from the her POV - apart from being maudlin and uncomfortably patronising ("She wishes she had been better, or braver," thinks Austen on her deathbed according to Kelly, please could we not.), 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?
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?
Also please why are we still doing this accent thing in audio books? Either hire a British narrator or let the American one just speak in her own voice, this switching to a really uncomfortable British accent every time a quote comes up is incredibly distracting.
I don't agree with a lot of the author's reading of the books and her character interpretation (I don't like Fanny's father either but calling him a sadist based on one offhand remark is a bit steep) but I understand that books are open to an infinite number of interpretations. What I hated however were those horrid little "authentic" vignettes that open each chapter, where the author writes about moments from Austen's life from the her POV - apart from being maudlin and uncomfortably patronising ("She wishes she had been better, or braver," thinks Austen on her deathbed according to Kelly, please could we not.), 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?
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?
Also please why are we still doing this accent thing in audio books? Either hire a British narrator or let the American one just speak in her own voice, this switching to a really uncomfortable British accent every time a quote comes up is incredibly distracting.