More often than not the romances she writes up are mere plot devises.

Spend some time with Austen, read her words, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

She wrote against the conventions and mocked the bourgeoisie with their fixations on money, status and position. Helena Kelly sees this too and terms such ideas as radical, which is a very fair point because Austen was radical. I laugh out loud when I read Austen because I hear the words of an angry women lashing back at the stuffy society in which she existed. In reality, Austen completely tears society apart with all its ridiculous nuances and expectations of propriety. They saw her books as instructional, beneficial even, for women readers of the age, for those who “needed” to learn to behave. All suggestions of irony, bitterness and sarcasm were completely wasted on their deaf ears. They, too, only saw the surface level of her writing. The critics who wrote them clearly had no idea of her genius. I find it extremely entertaining to read the early reviews she received for her books.

But beyond that she is so much more.Īusten is ruthless, brilliant and tenacious. Her stories are often perceived as fluff pieces with the romance always prevailing in the end. On the surface, Austen is a sentimental romance novelist who writes about love and relationships and their place within society. Unfortunately, there is a certain stigma attached to Austen’s works. 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. 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.

Jane austen the secret radical review