Book Review: Jane Austen, The Secret Radical

Jane Austen, the Secret Radicalby Helena KellyKnopf, 2017“Forget the Jane Austen you think you know,” urges Helena Kelly in her electrifying new book Jane Austen, the Secret Radical. “Forget the biographies; forget the pretty adaptations. Ignore the banknote. 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. 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. 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. 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. We know with complete clarity what her books are about, because she wants us to know that. 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. And here Kelly consistently shines. 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. Wodehouse.But she also does what she urges her readers to do: she reads the novels, and those readings are intensely enjoyable. Readers who want to know Jane Austen's works better will find a fantastic reading companion in Kelly, a reading companion who knows how to blend exposition and observation smoothly, as when she makes an aside about the marriage-mart in Austen's toughest novel:

The world of Sense and Sensibility is a sharp and glittering one, one in which an embrace can draw blood, in which metal is both bribe and weapon, reward and threat. The novel features the richest of Jane's heiresses, Miss Sophia Grey, who according to Mrs. Jennings is worth £50,000. This figure is likely to be an accurate one. Mrs. Jennings may be vulgar, she may love to leap to conclusions, but she is shrewd, and she knows Miss Grey's family (“I remember her aunt very well, Biddy Henshawe; she married a very wealthy man. But the family are all rich together”). Besides, this was the kind of information that tended to be common knowledge; it was perfectly normal, during Jane's lifetime, for the future a woman brought to a marriage to be included at the end of the wedding announcement printed in the newspapers.

Often Kelly's investigation of these supremely familiar novels has the thrilling effect of making them seem unfamiliar, almost making them seem new. We see the plots of Austen's books taken apart and fussed over, interrogated at times awkwardly, and sometimes laid out forensically, like the most famous sub-plot in any Jane Austen novel:

Jane tells us exactly what the relationship between Miss Bennet and Bingley consists of. It's all exceedingly correct, and it doesn't amount to very much. The two “meet tolerably often” but “never for many hours together,” and “they always see each other in large mixed parties.” Miss Bennet has “danced four times” with Bingley, “she saw him one morning at his own house, and has since dined with him in company four times.” Subsequently, she spends five days at Netherfield, but she's ill in bed for most of that time, and even when she's well again, there are other people around. The pair then bump into each other very briefly in Meryton and dance together at the Netherfield ball. At this point, Bingley leaves Hertfordshire and is persuaded, by the combined forces of his sister and Darcy, to stay away, and that's it. Miss Bennet doesn't see Bingley again until the following autumn, whereupon they almost immediately get engaged. Their interactions are nothing like enough to make them understand each other's character; it's a shaky foundation for married life, for all its decorum.

In the end, however much or little Kelly's sociological observations convince any of her audience, Jane Austen, The Secret Radical will make that audience think, make them question their assumptions about this most familiar of authors – and best of all, as our author advises, it will send readers back to the novels, which is always to the good.