In December 1943, Winston Churchill contracted pneumonia on a visit to North Africa and found himself banned from work and laid up in bed. While convalescing, he asked his daughter Sarah to read him Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It proved just the tonic. “What calm lives they had, those people!” he later wrote. “No worries about the French Revolution, or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars. Only manners controlling natural passion so far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances.”
He was by no means the first to hold such a view. In 1924, Rudyard Kipling published a story called “The Janeites” in which a group of World War I soldiers finds solace from the carnage in Austen’s supposedly genteel drawing-room dramas. Other, earlier writers saw those cocooned realms and “calm lives” as mere froth and frippery—too trivial to give succor, too airy to carry weight.
Two hundred years on from Austen’s death comes a book that reassesses her life and repositions her work, rebranding both as far more serious—even subversive—than we may have previously imagined. Throughout Jane Austen, the Secret Radical (Knopf, 336 pp., $27.95), Helena Kelly steers us away f,rom the glossy TV and film adaptations, idealized biopics, airbrushed portraits, imaginative spin-offs, and well-worn tourist trail, pointing us back to what really matters: the original source material of six imperishable novels that legions of readers have come to know and love.
Only we don’t know them. Or, as Kelly explains at the outset, “We know wrong.” Austen’s novels are not only witty, ironical comedies of manners about love and marriage; they also contain subtle commentaries and critiques of the social and political concerns that affected, or plagued, Regency England. This was a time of immense upheaval. Britain was at war with France and faced the constant threat of invasion. Austen’s novels were written “in a state that was, essentially, totalitarian”: habeas corpus was suspended; the definition of treason was extended to include writing, printing, reading, and arguably even thinking. As a result, writers wrote warily. Austen was no different. According to Kelly, Austen revealed her beliefs about the controversial issues of the day in couched language, deftly embedding or encrypting them within her engaging accounts of domestic life or checkered relationships. She assumed that her readers would be able to read between the lines for meaning—“just as readers in Communist states learned how to read what writers had to learn how to write.”
For those of us unable to locate or decode Austen’s radical thoughts, help is at hand. Kelly is an Austen scholar. She first discovered Austen’s novels in her teens and then reread them through a classics degree, law school, and a doctorate in English literature. An Oxford University lecturer, Kelly has written academic articles and taught courses on Austen. In this, her first book, Kelly offers close readings of Austen’s novels and analysis of the historical background that shaped them, teaching us “to read Jane as she wanted to be read.” This is quite a claim, and Kelly’s book takes the form of an ambitious, at times audacious, corrective. Yet for the most part she succeeds in stripping away the soft-focus veneer of Austen’s fictional worlds and exposing a harsh reality of unjust acts and bitter truths.
Each of Kelly’s chapters is devoted to a single novel and its corresponding issues. First up is the first-written though posthumously published Northanger Abbey (1817), Austen’s shortest, slightest offering, whose main redeeming aspect is its send-up of the sensationalist Gothic novel. Kelly is quick to flag the novel’s shortcomings—reassuring her reader that this Austen aficionado doesn’t have a rose-tinted view that colors judgment and beautifies blemishes. Kelly also wastes little time in outlining Northanger Abbey’s radical credentials: It breaks taboos by taking the reader on transgressive forays into bedrooms and other private chambers, and along the way highlights the life-threatening dangers of pregnancy and childbirth. We witness Austen’s light touch as her heroine, Catherine, trades the “alarms of romance” for the “anxieties of common life.” However, the biggest anxiety of all is a barely acknowledged fact and, as Kelly puts it, no laughing matter: “sex can kill you.”
If Northanger Abbey shows that early-19th-century English women risked their lives falling in love, then Sense and Sensibility (1811) reminds us that due to primogeniture—which “amounted almost to a fetish,” Kelly writes—widows and daughters faced losing their financial security to first-born sons. Kelly continues to shatter our preconceptions: This is a novel in which “love and family, honor and duty, have hardly any meaning. Promises are made to be broken. Women are exiled from their homes. Guardians don’t guard.” The perfidious Willoughby may be the novel’s rogue, but Kelly rakes around and dishes up enough dirt to sully the good reputation of the two male leads: Colonel Brandon is morally suspect while Edward Ferrars is “an unfaithful liar with (perhaps) troubling sexual inclinations.”
Kelly also points out that the colonel’s time spent in India constitutes “a black mark, a reminder of corruption, of avarice. Brandon is tainted by association.” In Austen’s difficult, somber, “inescapably political” novel of 1814 she went further and cut deeper. “Mansfield Park is about slavery,” Kelly succinctly declares. Early on in the novel, patriarch Sir Thomas Bertram and his son Tom depart for Antigua to oversee the management of their sugar plantation. We do not travel with them and do not see a single slave, but Kelly assures us that Austen is being subtle, not silent: References to colonialism and the slave trade can be found “if we look properly.” Kelly sorts and sifts, itemizes and analyzes, taking casual comments and seemingly innocuous subjects and objects—drinks, trees, addresses, reading material, even the book’s title—to be a trail of scattered clues with shady connotations and sinister subtexts.
Kelly’s chapters on Emma (1815) and Persuasion (1817) are particularly insightful. The former shows Austen’s artistic response to the devastating rural poverty unleashed by the Enclosure Acts; the latter redraws Austen as an author in tune to world events, one who skillfully sets a rekindled love affair against the downfall of dynasties and the erosion of religious certainties.
However, when Kelly turns her attention to Austen’s best-loved book she has mixed results. Pride and Prejudice (1813) is an effervescent novel, a joyful read (Austen herself described it as “rather too light & bright & sparkling”). Yet still Kelly traces black spots and rough edges. She finds fault with seemingly benign characters (affable observer Mr. Bennet is in actual fact “dangerously lax—ineffectual, incompetent”) and makes a valid case for Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship being a dismantling of class barriers (“titles and blood,” Kelly argues, “count for very little”). We come away convinced that the book is not the lightweight escapist romance Churchill believed it to be yet skeptical of Kelly’s claims that it can be considered “an army novel” and that it is “a revolutionary fairy tale” with a heroine who is “a radical.”
Where Austen was truly radical and revolutionary was in her fictional technique. The literary critic James Wood employs both those appellations in an essay on Austen: Her founding of character and caricature makes her “a natural revolutionary in fiction,” and her use of interior monologues, anticipating modernist stream-of-consciousness, “constitutes her radicalism.” Kelly ignores these innovations, eschewing style for content, which leaves her subject’s achievements only partially examined and her book decidedly lopsided. There is also woefully little on Austen’s juvenilia—most of it whimsical squibs and sketches but some of it pungent satire and riotous fantasies. “I murdered my father at a very early period of my Life,” confesses one young lady in a grisly letter; “I have since murdered my Mother, and I am now going to murder my Sister.”
Kelly’s revelations are consistently riveting, but one or two elicit a raised eyebrow. Does Catherine’s frantic, fumbling search through drawers and cavities in Northanger Abbey really look like “a thinly veiled description of female masturbation”? Are Austen novels truly of the same radical rank as anything written by Mary Wollstonecraft or Thomas Paine? Is her “continual drip” of politicized references seriously tantamount to “mind manipulation”? Kelly notes that Mansfield Park is “weighed down” with chains, the word cropping up 13 times. Lionel Trilling’s long, incisive 1954 essay on the novel makes no mention of chains, let alone slavery. Did Trilling overlook a potent symbol or has Kelly overstated a humble object?
Still, Kelly hits more than she misses, providing ample textual evidence for Austen mocking the establishment and railing against social injustice. “Consequence has its tax,” Austen writes in Persuasion, and Kelly’s gimlet-eyed observations and rigorous sleuth-work shake our belief that Austen only serves up fair outcomes, happy marriages, and trouble-free endings.
Despite the palpably dark layers in her novels, we will never know for sure Austen’s true intent and purpose. Kelly gives no evidence of any of Austen’s contemporaries professing to “get” her in the way she wanted to be got. More tellingly, Kelly finds no record of Austen disclosing a “real” agenda. The nearest we come to that is a letter in which Austen talks about wanting readers who have “a great deal of Ingenuity”—which Kelly takes as readers “who will read her carefully”—that is cannily, laterally. This, though close, is not close enough.
Kelly’s aim of teaching us to read Austen as she wanted to be read is a noble one, but really she is teaching us to read Austen as Kelly wants her to be read. This is no bad thing—as long as we don’t take each of Kelly’s bold assertions as hard fact. Jane Austen, the Secret Radical is astute, illuminating, and vastly entertaining. It may not completely alter our perception of Austen but it does give us a refreshing new slant on her work and, in so doing, helps us appreciate her anew.
Malcolm Forbes is a writer and critic in Edinburgh.
