It is against such contexts that Helena Kelly builds her case in Jane Austen, The Secret Radical. Clever, spirited Elizabeth Bennet is one of the great heroes of the British novel: we watch as she overcomes the challenges set by 'uncompanionable' sisters, negligent parents, arrogant gentlemen and a marriage market over which she has no control. So imagines the 'foolish, headstrong' Lydia Bennet of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) as, observed by her sister Elizabeth, she prepares to spend a summer on the skirts of a military encampment at Brighton. It's difficult to stand out from the crowd when writing about such an influential figure, but Helena Kelly has certainly achieved that with this smart, knowing, perceptive book.“She saw all the glories of the camp – its tents stretched forth in beauteous uniformity of lines, crowded with the young and the gay, and dazzling with scarlet and, to complete the view, she saw herself seated beneath a tent, tenderly flirting with at least six officers at once.”

Jane Austen: the Secret Radical is wonderful a revelation. It encapsulates smartly much that a frequently chintzy Austen industry would prefer to overlook. You'll definitely see Austen's works differently from now on However well you think you know the novels, you'll be raring to read them again once you've read this.Ī sublime piece of literary detective work that shows us once and for all how to be precisely the sort of reader that Austen deserves. does so brilliantly is to exhort us all to chuck out the chintz, and the teacups, and all the traditional romantic notions about Austen's work that have been fed to us for so long. Uncovering a radical, spirited and political engaged Austen, Jane Austen, The Secret Radical will encourage you to read Jane, all over again. In her first, brilliantly original book, Austen expert Helena Kelly introduces the reader to a passionate woman living in an age of revolution to a writer who used what was regarded as the lightest of literary genres, the novel, to grapple with the weightiest of subjects - feminism, slavery, abuse, the treatment of the poor, the power of the Church, even evolution - at a time, and in a place, when to write about such things directly was seen as akin to treason. Jane Austen, The Secret Radical puts that. We just don't read her properly - we haven't been reading her properly for 200 years. She writes about serious subjects and her books are deeply subversive.

Her novels don't confine themselves to grand houses and they were not written just for readers' enjoyment. '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 Almost everything we think we know about Jane Austen is wrong. An iconoclastic re-evaluation of one English Literature's most celebrated novelists.

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Jane austen secret radical