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A review by fearandtrembling
Jane Austen, the Secret Radical by Helena Kelly
1.0
This is a strange book and (sorry) a ludicrous one. 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. Like, Emma is not "about" enclosures and Mr. Knightley is not simply a kind of Marie Antoinette. These are issues percolating through the book and these are factors that must be considered, of course: class, gender, politics. Doing so makes for fruitful reading. But this is a book of wilful misreading. Instead of seeing how class relations inform social relationships and character, Kelly wants to see Emma (or the other novels) as being specifically about Austen's radical politics as determined solely by Kelly and Kelly herself. It's a weird way to read a book.
It's a disservice to Austen as a writer to be so uninterested in how the novels work while imputing a whole hodgepodge of politically correct ideas to the author to update her for our modern times. 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. It makes the contrasting ideas and perspectives in her novels all the more intriguing because it was a mind at work and the ideological tensions are worth sorting out. Kelly's tone, meanwhile, is dismissive of all the Austen scholarship that came before. She delves deep into the books but puts forth rather bizarre conclusions that it's hard not to see this book as more about herself and less about Austen and her novels.
It's a disservice to Austen as a writer to be so uninterested in how the novels work while imputing a whole hodgepodge of politically correct ideas to the author to update her for our modern times. 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. It makes the contrasting ideas and perspectives in her novels all the more intriguing because it was a mind at work and the ideological tensions are worth sorting out. Kelly's tone, meanwhile, is dismissive of all the Austen scholarship that came before. She delves deep into the books but puts forth rather bizarre conclusions that it's hard not to see this book as more about herself and less about Austen and her novels.