Caroline Criado-Perez, The GuardianĪ thoroughly impressive and convincing re-reading of Jane Austen’s works. A sublime piece of literary detective work that shows us once and for all how to be precisely the sort of reader that Austen deserves. Through a combination of beautifully precise close readings alongside Austen’s biographical, literary and historical context, Kelly shows us that the novels were about nothing more or less than the burning political questions of the day.
Helena Kelly makes the case for Austen as an author steeped in the fear of war and revolution who wrote about the burning political issues of the time. You’ll definitely see Austen’s works differently from now on. Beneath the drawing room chatter and matchmaking, Kelly points us toward Austen’s carefully woven-in ideas and opinions on, among others, the deadliness of marriage and motherhood, corruption in the church, and the debilitating poverty caused by enclosure of common lands. Kelly takes the author’s catalogue of works, much adapted, much loved, and turns them upside down, shaking out the petticoats and love stories to find a dark, politically motivated underbelly.
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.Ī thoroughly impressive and convincing re-reading of Jane Austen’s work.
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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