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BOOK REVIEW | NONFICTION

A Jane Austen Fit for the Age of Brexit

By JOHN SUTHERLAND JULY 10, 2017
JANE AUSTEN
The Secret Radical
By Helena Kelly
318 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.

The year 2016 belonged to Shakespeare; 2017 is Jane Austens, the 200th
anniversary of her premature death. Her face has been chosen to appear on Britains
10-pound note (the same amount she was first paid by a publisher). There has been,
and will be, a spate of commemorative events, festivals and, of course, books like
this. We are, as the witty television series put it, Lost in Austen.

Helena Kellys publisher got her kicks in early by scheduling the British release
of her book last autumn. And kicks they are. Jane Austen: The Secret Radical sets
out to raise hackles. As she asserts, almost everything we think we know about Jane
Austen is wrong. There has been, according to Kelly, only one person who has ever
read Jane Austen right. That would be Helena Kelly. Moreover, that unique reader is
closer to Jane (as she chummily calls her) than anyone since Cassandra, the sister
with whom Jane shared a bed. (Was Jane Austen Gay? asked Terry Castle in a
mischievous essay on the subject of that sleeping arrangement. It too sparked
ructions.)

Kellys chapters open with biographical fantasias of Janes stream of

consciousness at key moments. Inwardness is the essence of the book and
bossiness. Kelly ends with the schoolmistress instruction: Read Janes novels.
Read them again. Perhaps, enlightened by her, we can do something about our
failing grade.

Kellys readings are indeed eye-opening. That in Northanger Abbey Austen

describes Catherine Morland masturbating (Lets not mince words here) requires
an elasticity of imagination beyond the breaking point for the pusillanimous.

Of the many such far fetchings, the following can be cited from Mansfield Park
when Fanny is sent back to her family in Portsmouth to mend her ways. Fannys
father, a former marine officer fond of the bottle, is undoubtedly a sadist, Kelly
tells us (there is no evidence in the novel). What should we make, Kelly continues,
of the fact that Fannys two sisters fight over possession of a silver knife and that
one of Fannys first actions after arriving back in Portsmouth is to make sure they
each have one? Does she suspect does she know that they might need to protect
themselves?

From what? The (sexual?) sadism of their father in his cups? Silver knives are
harmlessly blunt and never sharpened: It wastes the precious metal. Were self-
protection the issue, the Price daughters would have secreted kitchen knives about
their persons. The point readers have traditionally assumed is that the girls have yet
to learn the moral self-control Fanny has acquired at Mansfield Park, not that they
are prepared (armed by Fanny) to slit their fathers throat.

Kelly sweeps the board clear of all previous critical commentary just so much
clutter, we must understand. Claire Tomalins 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 Austens
letters and with whom I wrote So You Think You Know Jane Austen, apparently
didnt. (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 Robertss
conclusions are cautious. Kellys are adventurous. Some work better than others.

Austen relished Lyme Regis and describes the town lovingly in Persuasion.
The seaside resorts boutiques sold fossils for the tourists mantelpieces. Kelly
imagines Anne Elliot picking one up and Jane foreseeing what? Evolutionary
theory. Kelly toys with the idea that Harriet Smith and Jane Fairfax are half sisters in
Emma. If true, why would Austen not make that relationship clearer? It would
seem less a case of secretiveness than obfuscation.

Such things in Kellys book irritate me, as they will others. But, taking a deep
breath, I concede that it is, stripped of its flights of fancy, an important revisionary
work for 2017. The critic who has done the most to reform our understanding of
Austen in the last 50 years is ostentatiously never referred to, but Jane Austen: The
Secret Radical has clearly been written to overturn Marilyn Butlers Jane Austen
and the War of Ideas.

Butlers thesis, which became critical orthodoxy, rests on a wide-ranging survey

of Jacobin (radical, pro-revolutionary) fiction. It concludes that Austen was not in
the slightest radical and made no secret of her militant anti-Jacobinism in her
novels. Austen, Butler asserted, believed wholeheartedly in an England founded on
monarchy, the Anglican Church and a stable class system.

Butlers 1975 portrait of Austen was a perfect fit for Mrs. Thatchers 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? Elizabeths 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 Waughs
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.

How might Marilyn Butlers Elizabeth Bennet have voted on June 8, 2017? The
question answers itself. The fact that Theresa May is a vicars daughter, as was Jane
Austen, would have been a plus. But Kellys Elizabeth is from another political
galaxy. Elizabeths undutifulness as a daughter, her laughter, her lack of reverence
for Mr. Collins, her lack of respect for Lady Catherine de Bourgh theyre all of a
piece. Elizabeth is, in short, constructed to be a conservatives nightmare. Take
that, Marilyn Butler.

Why does Kellys Elizabeth marry the master of Pemberley? Because she is
strong enough to radicalize him. Would Kellys Elizabeth have voted for Jeremy
Corbyn? The answer is obvious.

Kellys book is reckless, but she knows the novels inside out. Her views, when
not designed to annoy the reader, are informative. She is astute and almost certainly
right on the Austen familys conspiracy to sweeten Janes image and neutralize her
ideas. The speculation that the vicars family murdered her (call it a mercy killing)
may, however, seem a trifle questionable.

Kelly is amusingly corrective on the travesty of the Regency-Romanticized

versions of Austen retailed by film and television. Colin Firths wet shirt is hung out
to dry. Why was Austen secretive? Kelly points to the totalitarian nature of the
British state, consumed as it was by hostilities, first with its rebellious colonies and
then with France. For almost all her life, Kelly reminds us, Britain was at war.

The most brilliant of Kellys arguments draws our attention to the enclosure of
common land in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. (She sees Mr. Knightley, in
Emma, as a brutal encloser.) It is equivalent, she suggests, to the contemporary
privatizations that have led to the current obscene disparity of wealth and poverty in
Britain.

Helena Kelly provokes. 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. So,
with a patient sigh, lets do what she tells us to and read the novels again.
 John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe professor emeritus, University College London.

A version of this review appears in print on July 16, 2017, on Page BR11 of the Sunday Book Review with
the headline: You Dont Know Jane.

2017 The New York Times Company