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. Spoiler alert for some of the STUPID suggestions the author puts forward about Jane and her writing, which are new to me, and ridiculous:

Jane talks in one letter about wanting readers who have “a great deal of ingenuity,” who will read her carefully. In wartime, in a totalitarian regime, and in a culture that took the written word far more seriously than we do, she could have expected to find them.Then you get to the part where she explains that the reason we never learn Colonel Brandon’s first name in Sense and Sensibility is that it is undoubtedly William, and that if Austen were to reveal this to us, we would realize that his ward Eliza William is in fact his illegitimate daughter. You know what, sure. The Making of Jane Austen is more academic. It can be dry, but its argument is also more compelling. 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. However, Kelly lost me completely when she started suggesting that all the bedroom scenes in Northanger Abbey had sexual connotations. I prefer to leave Northanger Abbey as a clever play on the Gothic novel. Catherine Moreland is masturbating, not opening a cabinet. “Let’s not mince words here. With all its folds and cavities, the key, the fingers, the fluttering and trembling, this looks a lot like a thinly veiled description of female masturbation.”

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. Austen's heroines are similarly often required to persevere, though more stoically, suffering in silence after believing their chance of happiness has been lost forever. The moment when Elinor Dashwood steels herself before seeing her love Edward Ferrars, wrongly believing he has married another – "I will be calm, I will be mistress of myself" – is both heartbreaking and inspiring; a strength of character rendered particularly powerfully by Emma Thompson in her performance in the 1995 Ang Lee film adaptation that she also scripted. In Persuasion, protagonist Anne Elliot is confronted with Captain Wentworth who she loved and rejected nine years ago, and apparently fails to recognise her because she is so changed ("so altered that he should not have known her again"); she is mortified, as she still loves him, though she tries to hide all display of emotion. Some claim this is Austen's most romantic novel, partly because of how Anne learns to reveal her real feelings so that Wentworth can "know" her truly, leading to one of the most moving literary denouements in which he tells her: "You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope". The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” -Northanger Abbey With regards to marriage, there’s not any real evidence for the one-night engagement to Harris Bigg-Wither; the ‘proof’ seems to have been pieced together by a niece who wasn’t even born at the time of the engagement. So it’s possible no one ever proposed to Austen at all! Would she have married if the right man had come along? Maybe. But she’d seen enough of the dangers of marriage and the demands of endless child-bearing to have made her cautious.And in the meantime, is it really all that interesting to worry about how Austen meant her work to be taken? We’ll never meet Austen, but we have her books. You can find all sorts of interesting things in them that she may or may not have meant to put in there, including masturbation scenes if you are so inclined. Why waste so much energy and critical credibility worrying about whether or not we’re supposed to find them there? Mr. Knightly doesn’t actually love Emma, he only wants control over Hartford, so that he can enforce more enclosures of the land. An authoress who knew that the novel, until then widely seen as mindless “trash,” could be a great art form and who did a lot — perhaps more than any other writer — to make it into one. It is a shame that Kelly doesn’t leave much room for Austen’s bitingly funny letters and juvenilia, both of which can leave no reader in doubt of Austen’s disposition toward the satirical, the radical and, more often than not, the grotesque. I was also not sold on Kelly’s decision to open each chapter with a short fictional section based on Austen’s letters. Her justification (Austen’s assertion that it is in fiction that one will find “the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties”) was convincing, but I found the approach grating. Austen is one of the greatest writers ever to have lived – if we are to read fiction, I would rather have read her own words. Or perhaps this would have been the place for some letter extracts. Both! I’m really torn on this question, to be honest. As I said above, the popular picture of Austen does conceal the text. But many of adaptations and the continuations and sequels and so on are really fun and they make Austen accessible; those aren’t bad things. I’ve just finished reading a book called Lydia by Natasha Farrant which I very much enjoyed and which I think would be a great ‘gateway’ book into the original novels. And then, look at something like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – it’s absurd but at the same time anyone reading it has read a good three-quarters of Austen’s novel. Plus, of course, it makes explicit the sense of external menace in the book, though Austen’s characters are bothered about the French, not the zombie hordes! But, yes, I suppose I’d like to see less romance, and more of the grittier adaptations, like the 1999 Mansfield Park , directed by Patricia Rozema. The Jane Austen conjured up by the adaptions, etc. doesn’t bear all that much resemblance to the authoress of the novels!