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A review by jaironside
Jane Austen, the Secret Radical by Helena Kelly
5.0
More 4.5 stars but a very good read
If you are a fan of Jane Austen because you like the books as light, diverting romances that warn of the perils of money and morality, AND you really don't want that opinion shaken, this book is not for you.
However if you're like me and you've read all Jane Austen's work both with pleasure and with a certain inexplicable frustration, then give this ago. Secret Radical helped nudge me in the direction I needed to go in to fully enjoy Austen's work. So much so that at times you feel almost as if you are reading a codex for an ancient text in a long dead language. The Da Vinci code has nothing on this!
Helena Kelly put it best when she referred to Austen as a miniturist with every almost invisible stroke mattering and contributing to the whole. Once you really take that on board and start looking at the context of the books in their time, it's like pulling open a secret drawer in a dresser. I'd always felt that Jane Austen's work was political but I couldn't entirely access why. As sarcastic and irreverant and occadionally daringly reckless as she is in her work, access this lower layer and you realise how small your reading was.
Anyone a Chaucer fan? I remember as a child reading the knight's tale and thinking it was inconsistent with historical fact. This was the first inkling I'd had that author's might say one thing while cleverly leading you to see they mean something else entirely. This is the same.
On the surface Jane Austen's six published novels are romances although not necessarily happy ones. But what are the real themes behind them embodied both by the story and the characters?
Well for Jane Austen's contemporaries - when you could be imprisoned for writing anything which seemed to criticise the church or the government, it's pretty damning stuff.
Here's two examples;
I had never understood why exactly I wasn't that fond of Emma and yet I kept returning over and over again to Mansfield Park when I really didn't like Fanny Price that much.
The reason is the deep rooted underlying themes situated in both. Not just situated but buried in every phrase, folded around every scene. It's pervasive and inescapable and yet subtle enough that we with 200 yrs standing between us and the author, have missed the point entirely.
I'd always found Emma to be uncomfortablt claustrophobic, a weird reaction given how much time is spent in the book outside in gardens, on picnics, walking to the village. But the answer is obvious. Emma is about the enclousure act that removed the right of commoning and prevented the poor from subsidising their livlihoods gleaming food from the common land. Once you see one description of a hedge or barrier you realise just how many their are. Without ever cominv right out and saying it Austen is showing her readers just what the consequences of parceling up the land in order to swell the coffers of the rich whilst making no provision to aid the poor who became even poorer and desperate with it. No wonder I found it claustrophobic. It is literally about being shut in and enclosed.
Mansfield Park? A book so risky that of all Jane's novels it was never reviewed? It's all about slavery and the corruption of the Church of England who at that time owned slaves in America and Haiti etc Does that sound far fetched? I invite you to read up on it. I'd known some of it and I was shocked. In fact reread the novel and look how often Austen calls the themes of slavery, oppression, emancipation and corruption to mind. At the time of writing England was congratulating itself on having banned slavery in the British Isles. This allowed a platform of if not morally dubious at least selectively forgetful behaviour since Britain still took imports produced by slave labour, many wealthy families owed their wealth to their foreign plantations, the C of E was actually endorsing slavery with propaganda so absurd it would be funny if it wasn't sould destroying. The reasi this book kept calling me back was because it's underlying message was don't pretend you can't see. seek the truth.
The other examples are just as illuminating.
While I found myself coming to many of the same conclusions as Kelly, I was drawn up short by her view of certain heros. Not because I needed them untouched abd unquestioned but because I felt that some of her connections were too tenuous. In other instances either Kelky did not follow links to their logical cinclusion or like Austen herself was asking us to draw our own conclusions.
Overall though I really enjoyed this and plan to reread all Austen's books to compare.
If you are a fan of Jane Austen because you like the books as light, diverting romances that warn of the perils of money and morality, AND you really don't want that opinion shaken, this book is not for you.
However if you're like me and you've read all Jane Austen's work both with pleasure and with a certain inexplicable frustration, then give this ago. Secret Radical helped nudge me in the direction I needed to go in to fully enjoy Austen's work. So much so that at times you feel almost as if you are reading a codex for an ancient text in a long dead language. The Da Vinci code has nothing on this!
Helena Kelly put it best when she referred to Austen as a miniturist with every almost invisible stroke mattering and contributing to the whole. Once you really take that on board and start looking at the context of the books in their time, it's like pulling open a secret drawer in a dresser. I'd always felt that Jane Austen's work was political but I couldn't entirely access why. As sarcastic and irreverant and occadionally daringly reckless as she is in her work, access this lower layer and you realise how small your reading was.
Anyone a Chaucer fan? I remember as a child reading the knight's tale and thinking it was inconsistent with historical fact. This was the first inkling I'd had that author's might say one thing while cleverly leading you to see they mean something else entirely. This is the same.
On the surface Jane Austen's six published novels are romances although not necessarily happy ones. But what are the real themes behind them embodied both by the story and the characters?
Well for Jane Austen's contemporaries - when you could be imprisoned for writing anything which seemed to criticise the church or the government, it's pretty damning stuff.
Here's two examples;
I had never understood why exactly I wasn't that fond of Emma and yet I kept returning over and over again to Mansfield Park when I really didn't like Fanny Price that much.
The reason is the deep rooted underlying themes situated in both. Not just situated but buried in every phrase, folded around every scene. It's pervasive and inescapable and yet subtle enough that we with 200 yrs standing between us and the author, have missed the point entirely.
I'd always found Emma to be uncomfortablt claustrophobic, a weird reaction given how much time is spent in the book outside in gardens, on picnics, walking to the village. But the answer is obvious. Emma is about the enclousure act that removed the right of commoning and prevented the poor from subsidising their livlihoods gleaming food from the common land. Once you see one description of a hedge or barrier you realise just how many their are. Without ever cominv right out and saying it Austen is showing her readers just what the consequences of parceling up the land in order to swell the coffers of the rich whilst making no provision to aid the poor who became even poorer and desperate with it. No wonder I found it claustrophobic. It is literally about being shut in and enclosed.
Mansfield Park? A book so risky that of all Jane's novels it was never reviewed? It's all about slavery and the corruption of the Church of England who at that time owned slaves in America and Haiti etc Does that sound far fetched? I invite you to read up on it. I'd known some of it and I was shocked. In fact reread the novel and look how often Austen calls the themes of slavery, oppression, emancipation and corruption to mind. At the time of writing England was congratulating itself on having banned slavery in the British Isles. This allowed a platform of if not morally dubious at least selectively forgetful behaviour since Britain still took imports produced by slave labour, many wealthy families owed their wealth to their foreign plantations, the C of E was actually endorsing slavery with propaganda so absurd it would be funny if it wasn't sould destroying. The reasi this book kept calling me back was because it's underlying message was don't pretend you can't see. seek the truth.
The other examples are just as illuminating.
While I found myself coming to many of the same conclusions as Kelly, I was drawn up short by her view of certain heros. Not because I needed them untouched abd unquestioned but because I felt that some of her connections were too tenuous. In other instances either Kelky did not follow links to their logical cinclusion or like Austen herself was asking us to draw our own conclusions.
Overall though I really enjoyed this and plan to reread all Austen's books to compare.