Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

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Marriage mattered because it was the defining action of a woman’s life; to accept or refuse a proposal was almost the only decision that a woman could make for herself, the only sort of control she could exert in a world that must very often have seemed as if it were spiraling into turmoil. Jane’s novels aren’t romantic. But it’s become increasingly difficult for readers to see this. The book is split up into sections following each of her published novels, as well as one concerning her life, and her death. Some chapters worked better for me than others. The great chapters contained a unifying theory that brought together the historical context and the actual plot and actions of the characters: Northanger Abbey (where the childbirth stuff is contained, as well as some fascinating stuff about gothic novels), Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice were the standouts, followed pretty closely by the chapter on Persuasion. Unsurprisingly, despite some great historical context concerning slavery, Mansfield Park was one of the weaker ones, as even Kelly (who studies Austen for her job) seems unable to come up with a unifying theory for that book. For as much as the book hints at the subject of slavery and the complicity of the church, that is not what the book is actually about (I have read it twice, and still can't figure out what we're supposed to take away from the story of Fanny and her relations). The subtext may be all about the historical context, but the actual text for me remains obscure. The chapter about Emma was all right, but the subject of enclosure just isn't as interesting to me as it seems to have been to Kelly.

Jane wasn’t a genius — inspired, unthinking; she was an artist. She compared herself to a miniature painter; in her work every stroke of the brush, every word, every character name and every line of poetry quoted, every location, matters. The Age of Brass" finds Kelly's reading of Sense and Sensibility as a book about "property and inheritance--about greed and the terrible, selfish things that families do to each other for the sake of money." urn:oclc:record:960040877 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier janeaustensecret0000kell Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s275wj4fg63 Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781785781162 We can’t shrug off apparent contradictions or look only for confirmation of what we think we already know. We have to read, and we have to read carefully, because Jane had to write carefully, because she was a woman and because she was living through a time when ideas both scared and excited people.

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We also talked about the novel Emma . For Professor Menand, this novel is really about Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. As many of you know, I very much agree ! 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.

Mr. Knightly doesn’t actually love Emma, he only wants control over Hartford, so that he can enforce more enclosures of the land. She never expected to be read the way we read her, gulped down as escapist historical fiction, fodder for romantic fantasies. Yes, she wanted to be enjoyed; she wanted people to feel as strongly about her characters as she did herself. But for Jane a story about love and marriage wasn’t ever a light and frothy confection. But there are downsides. The structure of the book is peculiar, and designed to give fodder for those looking to disparage. Each chapter opens with a little speculative vignette from inside Austen’s head, supposed to give us insight into what she was thinking about at the time she composed each novel. Right there, Kelly is going to lose just about every serious Austen scholar. She claims rigor in basing biographical information on known fact instead of family tradition (and readers of the biographies would do well to be cautious about family traditions regarding Austen’s life and works) but she does not extend the same rigor to her readings of the novels—there are several unforced errors here. Also, she gives no indication that she has read much literary criticism of Austen’s work, which allows critics to dismiss her as a lightweight. The publicists didn’t help by branding the book as revolutionary; many of its ideas can be found in that neglected body of scholarship. And she has a tendency to get overly enthusiastic and take her arguments beyond a reasonable point (especially when they are tainted with Freudian nonsense). In several chapters she mistakes the context of a novel for the central point of the novel. Points that were initially interesting sometimes devolve into the ridiculous.May I ask you what you think of the great deal of Jane Austen fan fiction and film adaptations of the recent years? Do they contribute to the popularity of her work or do they contribute to their misinterpretation? Enclosure was the turning of common lands into privately held lands for use by the rich only. "Gruel" is Kelly's chapter on Emma, in which Jane references how wealth was concentrated into the hands of a few while workers starved, unable to afford British wheat. The Corn Laws kept the price artificially kept high; good for farmers and disastrous for the working poor. If you want to stay with the novels and the Jane Austen you already know, you should stop reading now,” she announces at the end of her introduction. “If you want to read Jane as she wanted to be read — if you want to know her — then read on.” Menand says Austen is important not just as an early, seminal novelist in English, but also as an innovator. You have to understand Austen to understand groundbreaking experimentalists like James Joyce.

The speeches that are put into the heroes’ mouths, their thoughts and designs—the chief of all this must be invention.” The older and more intelligent Eleanor Tilney, who reads history chiefly for pleasure, expresses herself “very well contented to take the false with the true.” When discussing titles in the chapter on Pride and Prejudice, Kelly refers to Lady Catherine de Bourgh as the daughter of an earl and claims “there are no more than a handful of them in England.”(6) An earl is indeed the third highest title in the British peerage after duke and marquess as Kelly states, but whilst there were less than 20 English dukedoms and a similar number of marquessates at the start of the Regency, there were decidedly more than ‘a handful’ of earls. According to Debrett’s, there were about 90 English earldoms alone at the start of the Regency – a very large handful!(7)Jane’s novels, in truth, are as revolutionary, at their heart, as anything that Wollstonecraft or Tom Paine wrote. But by and large, they’re so cleverly crafted that unless readers are looking in the right places — reading them in the right way — they simply won’t understand.

The examining of their own hearts is a journey each Austen protagonist takes on her own. Emma does not change her snobbish behaviour because of Mr. Knightly’s “badly done, Emma, badly done indeed!”. She does because she empathizes with Miss Bates, a sad, distorted version of the single woman she aspires to be. Austen’s heroes are only part of her heroines’ happy endings, and not even the most important part. Lizzy’s ultimate triumph is in standing up for herself against the bully Lady Catherine and everything she represents – void tradition, oppression, the will of imposing one’s ideas on others considered weaker than oneself … in one word, the patriarchy. None of Austen’s heroines marry their intended because they have taught them how to live, but in spite of the fact they have tried. Their journeys do not end in lovers’ meetings; they end with a deeper understanding of themselves, and with the acquisition of the strength necessary to be who they want to be in a society that does everything to prevent them from succeeding. However difficult it is to imagine, Mr. Darcy is not the most important part of Jane Austen, by a long shot. In Jane’s time, there were deep-rooted prejudices in favour of the nobility and the clergy. Pride and Prejudice undermines both, in the persons of Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mr Collins. Could Lady Catherine really be a sensible person to appoint Mr Collins to the living at her disposal and then actually welcome his irksome company? When the contrast is drawn between the noble Lady Catherine’s behaviour and Elizabeth Bennet’s aunt and uncle, the Gardiners, who are in trade, the reader’s conclusion is inevitable: good breeding has nothing to do with titles. Mansfield Park has always seemed a more serious book to me than Jane’s other novels, but I had not made the connection between the names used in the book and the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade. The very name of the book – Mansfield – links the book to Lord Mansfield whose judgement ‘removed the practical basis’(2) on which slavery rested, and the hated Mrs Norris shares her name with a notorious slave trader.When it comes to Jane, so many images have been danced before us, so rich, so vivid, so prettily presented. They’ve been seared onto our retinas in the sweaty darkness of a cinema, and the aftereffect remains, a shadow on top of everything we look at subsequently.