Wodehouse.But she also does what she urges her readers to do: she reads the novels, and those readings are intensely enjoyable. She indulges in the full range of gimmickry virtually designed to make militant Janeites take to the streets she lards her account with many fictionalized scenes starring Austen and her circle, and she liberally reads her heroine's mind, and she flings around whimsy and supposition with the abandon of an Emma Woodhouse – or a P.G. And they're not about the French Revolution or repealing the Corn Laws or the intricacies of Home Rule, no matter how many writers come along and say they are.The test of those writers won't therefor be whether or not they can actually find in the novels of Jane Austen things that aren't there – it'll be how they take us through those novels in the course of their ideological Easter egg hunt.
We know with complete clarity what her books are about, because she wants us to know that.
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. 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.
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