But while many people find Austen’s novels to be light romances, Kelly argues that we must read more deeply to unearth the true thoughts and less orthodox opinions of a woman who mocked the monarchy, criticized the clergy, and thumbed her nose at the titled aristocracy. With such a scanty biography, and a family that was heavily invested in controlling her image after her death, Oxford professor Helena Kelly argues that to truly understand Austen’s life, we must look to her published works, because “it is impossible for anyone to write thousands upon thousands of words and reveal nothing of how she thinks or what she believes.” It is to Austen’s six novels that Kelly turns to understand the author’s true thoughts and opinions, bolstered by her letters and Kelly’s knowledge of English history. In accordance with decorum, she did not publish under her own name during her lifetime. Between the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, England had been at war for most of her life, and she never had the chance to travel outside the country. She was unmarried, and lived with her widowed mother and spinster sister, in a cottage on the grounds of the estate of one of her many brothers. When Jane Austen died in July 1817, she had lived only forty-one years, a quiet life amongst her family and friends that does not make for a remarkable biography. 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.” 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.“Jane’s novels, in truth, are as revolutionary as anything thing that Wollstonecraft or Tom Paine wrote.
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.
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