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.’ Caroline Criado-Perez, Guardian Finally Persuasion! I loved this one too much to speak intelligently about it, though I loved the bit about the hazelnut. That's another thing, Helena is FUNNY, I laughed twice. 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. Butler’s 1975 portrait of Austen was a perfect fit for Mrs. Thatcher’s assumption of the Tory leadership that same year, and for her three administrations. Butler saw Elizabeth Bennet, to take a prime example, as irrationally prejudiced at the opening of “Pride and Prejudice.” Lizzy is, however, possessed of intelligence. She is educated by trial, error and near disaster. She finally makes the rational moral choice. When did she fall in love with Darcy? Elizabeth’s sister Jane asks. “I believe,” replies Elizabeth, “ I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.” It is not a joke. As do country houses elsewhere in literature — Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead, for instance — Pemberley embodies the Tory values of old England. This is what Elizabeth is marrying into and what she will support, wholeheartedly, as Mrs. Darcy.

This, apparently, is why Austen set part of Persuasion in Lyme Regis - not, as we had thought for the last 200 years, because Lyme Regis was a seaside resort she herself very much liked. In the chapter on Sense and Sensibility, Kelly suggests that Jane was indirectly criticising the men in her family for failing to provide adequately for the women who were dependent on them – Jane, her sister Cassandra, and their mother. I already knew how hard Jane had found it when her father suddenly decided to give up the living at Steventon and uproot his family from the only home they had ever known and settle them in Bath, but I had never really considered the alternative. Kelly writes that Jane’s father need not have given up the majority of his income to his eldest son – who, by the way, already had the means to support himself – but could have hired a curate to help him and retained most of the income to support his wife and daughters. Another question that I had never asked was why, after the death of Jane’s father, it took her rich brother Edward Knight four years to offer his mother and sisters a permanent home. 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.Furthermore, the snarkiness and disrespect to other critics and Janeites was insane. For example, one passage in the book: ”Slavery wasn’t some distant, abstract notice for Jane. Her own family has ties to the Caribbean. Her eldest brother James, has a slave owning grandfather, James Nibbs, an Oxford acquaintance of the Reverend George Austen” leads to the following footnote: “The biography Claire Tomlin includes this information in an appendix about attitudes to slavery, almost as if she thinks the issue doesn’t really have anything to do with Jane or her writing.” Lccn 2016497536 Ocr tesseract 5.2.0-1-gc42a Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9769 Ocr_module_version 0.0.18 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000738 Openlibrary_edition

It’s a pity that the weakest chapter—about Northanger Abbey—comes first, and that its greatest weakness, a fondness for reading sexual imagery into the text, is repeated in the second chapter. But from that point on Kelly settles into playing to her strengths, and the book offers a coherent and at least partly credible take on a writer far deeper than most give her credit for. I learned a lot, I saw Austen with fresh eyes, and that’s a lot for me to say after a lifetime of immersion. She even makes me want to reread Emma, and I didn’t think anyone could achieve that!

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I love Jane Austen’s novels and I know something of Jane’s life and period. I certainly ought to, as one chapter in my new book ( What Regency Women Did For Us) is given over to my favourite author! However, I am not a literary critic and have never sought to pull Jane Austen’s novels to pieces in search for greater meaning. I accepted this review copy on the basis that it promised new insights into the novels through greater knowledge of the period in which Jane Austen wrote. As a Regency historian, I decided to hear what Kelly had to say. It is therefore not to be wondered at that Austen may have hidden her radical politics under the surface of a seemingly more “frothy confection”, although, as Kelly points out, to view marriage as a frivolous topic in an 18th- or 19th-century novel is shamefully ahistorical. “Marriage as Jane knew it involved a woman giving up everything to her husband – her money, her body, her very existence as a legal adult. Husbands could beat their wives, rape them, imprison them, take their children away, all within the bounds of the law.” And that is before we even get on to the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth that were implicit in any marriage plot at a time where “almost every family had a tale of maternal death to tell”. 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. Kelly sweeps the board clear of all previous critical commentary — just so much clutter, we must understand. Claire Tomalin’s acclaimed 1997 biography is dismissed in a footnote as having hopelessly missed the point of “Mansfield Park.” R. W. Chapman, the scholar who founded modern Austen studies, is a purveyor of “nonsense.” Deirdre Le Faye, who produced the authoritative edition of Austen’s letters and with whom I wrote “So You Think You Know Jane Austen,” apparently didn’t. (Nor, one assumes, did I.) Critics who would seem, on the face of it, congenial are resolutely blanked. In 1979, Warren Roberts produced a thoughtful study called “Jane Austen and the French Revolution.” The great event is never mentioned in the novels, but it is there, Roberts argues, invisibly woven into the narratives. Kelly makes the same point herself to support her “secret radical” thesis. But Roberts’s conclusions are cautious. Kelly’s are adventurous. Some work better than others. I LOVE this so much. I had the pleasure of having a class with Helena on Jane Austen, where many of the points she brought up in this book were discussed, so I am a bit biased - she introduced me to Clueless AND Bride and Prejudice and was generally awesome, how could I not love her, right?