Like Butler’s book, each chapter is full of intriguing ideas. Then Kelly draws us into a discussion of one of the novels. Each chapter begins with an imaginative description Austen at some point in her life, what she might have been thinking and feeling. It’s beautifully written and enjoyable to read. Jane Austen, the Secret Radical by Helena Kelly brings startling possibilities to Austen’s novels. She is much more speculative, however, and sometimes her suggestions are shocking. Helena Kelly, in Jane Austen, The Secret Radical, also examines ideas and issues from Austen’s time and applies them to the novels. Personally, I agree.īut this time, let’s consider an author who answers those questions very differently. Butler proposes that Austen was strongly presenting a Christian, moral, conservative point of view.
What did she expect her original readers to hear and understand? Was she writing light romances, or did she have deeper messages?Įarlier this month, we talked about Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. We all want to know what Jane Austen was really trying to say in her novels. ” wore them to the ball, along with the Crawfords’ necklace.– Mansfield Park
We see a writer who understood that the novel-until then seen as mindless "trash"-could be a great art form and who, perhaps more than any other writer up to that time, imbued it with its particular greatness.Fanny Price, “having, with delightful feelings, joined the chain and the cross-those memorials of the two most beloved of her heart, those dearest tokens so formed for each other by everything real and imaginary-and put them round her neck, and seen and felt how full of William and Edmund they were. The author reveals just how in the novels we find the real Jane Austen: a clever, clear-sighted woman "of information," fully aware of what was going on in the world and sure about what she thought of it. Kelly illuminates the radical subjects-slavery, poverty, feminism, the Church, evolution, among them-considered treasonous at the time, that Austen deftly explored in the six novels that have come to embody an age. In this fascinating, revelatory work, Helena Kelly-dazzling Jane Austen authority-looks past the grand houses, the pretty young women, past the demure drawing room dramas and witty commentary on the narrow social worlds of her time that became the hallmark of Austen's work to bring to light the serious, ambitious, deeply subversive nature of this beloved writer. A brilliant, illuminating reassessment of the life and work of Jane Austen that makes clear how Austen has been misread for the past two centuries and that shows us how she intended her books to be read, revealing, as well, how subversive and daring-how truly radical-a writer she was.
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