But she was also a passionately dedicated storyteller when reading Pride and Prejudice or Emma, we have the pleasantly overwhelming sense of being in the hands of a masterful dramatist intent on her work.
To put it mildly, this is a fairly woolly old contention William Dean Howells was making similar points nearly a century ago.They weren't particularly convincing then, and they're no more convincing now yes, Jane Austen as a writer breathed the same political and intellectual air as everybody else in the Hampshire of her day, and she was obviously an acute observer. Kelly's ongoing contention is that Jane Austen's novels are charged with social radicalism, that she can scarcely ever leave tacit or even overt commentary on the social issues of her day out of her stories, issues like slavery and budding feminism that seem at the surface hardly to touch on those stories.
Read Jane's novels.” And readers should of course certainly do that – it's ready-made one-size-fits-all excellent literary advice – but they should read Kelly's book as well, for the thought-provoking energy on virtually every page.That energy is seldom if ever undergirded by originality. “Forget the biographies forget the pretty adaptations. The trick was never to be too explicit, too obvious.Jane Austen, the Secret Radical by Helena KellyKnopf, 2017“Forget the Jane Austen you think you know,” urges Helena Kelly in her electrifying new book Jane Austen, the Secret Radical. 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. In so doing, she offered trenchant commentary on the social and political issues of the day. 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. The aim was “to terrify writers and publishers into policing themselves.” Some, like Sir Walter Scott, took refuge in historical or foreign settings. 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.
Wartime Britain was a totalitarian state, Kelly writes, “with the unpleasant habits” that such states exhibit, particularly regarding intellectual life.
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