You won’t read Austen the same way again.” - The New Yorker An interpretive coup that is dazzling and dizzying. “Do we read Jane Austen’s novels as she intended? In this riveting literary-biographical study, the answer is a resounding no. Kelly shows us that the novels were about nothing more or less than the burning political questions of the day.” - The Guardian “A sublime piece of literary detective work.

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. 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. So, with a patient sigh, let’s do what she tells us to and read the novels again.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. But in Jane Austen: The Secret Radical she has given us a book for 2017, perhaps the most turmoil-filled year in Britain since 1945. Her views, when not designed to annoy the reader, are informative. Kelly’s book is reckless, but she knows the novels inside out. But, taking a deep breath, I concede that it is, stripped of its flights of fancy, an important revisionary work for 2017.

Chapman, the scholar who founded modern Austen studies, is a purveyor of 'nonsense'. Claire Tomalin’s acclaimed 1997 biography is dismissed in a footnote as having hopelessly missed the point of Mansfield Park. Kelly sweeps the board clear of all previous critical commentary - just so much clutter, we must understand. There has been, according to Kelly, only one person who has ever read Jane Austen right. As she asserts, almost everything we think we know about Jane Austen is wrong. Jane Austen: The Secret Radical sets out to raise hackles.

Jane austen the secret radical review