Book Review: Jane Austen the Secret Radical by Helena Kelly, and introducing a new upcoming series of Jane Austen Short Stories by Ruth Leigh

Today I offer my review of a provocative book for Jane Austen fans.

Jane Austen the Secret Radical by Helena Kelly is published by Vintage.

I also introduce you to a new book of Jane Austen short stories, coming soon.

As a keen reader of Jane Austen’s novels I was intrigued to read Helena Kelly’s take on the great author.

I’ve visited Jane Austen’s cottage at Chawton, learned something of her family situation, and read a number of books about her as well as all her novels, but found it very sobering to read Kelly’s account of Jane’s family, and her relatives’ attitude to her as a novelist. To me it showed how – in the case of the greatest novelists who attract so much admiration perhaps a century or more later – what a dangerous thing writing novels can be. Family members can feel threatened by what their relatives’ novels reveal when they become hugely popular. There are many curious stories about actions that literary executors chose to take – for instance in the cases of Lewis Carroll, James Joyce and Franz Kafka.

With Jane Austen in particular, the attitude taken by her nephew James-Edward, her second biographer, and by Henry, her brother, who wrote a biographical note to go in her first published novel, give us much cause to reflect. Henry, for example, makes it clear his chief concern is his anxiety to prove that his sister Jane didn’t need to write books for money; he himself considered her novel writing as just a minor amusement, and that was how Jane felt about it too. Kelly states that he deliberately lied about Jane. Cassandra, too, Jane’s beloved sister, and sole literary executor, also does not escape censure – we learn that she wrote letters about Jane Austen which cannot be trusted.

No other writer of this genre – ostensibly romance – is so penetrating, so incisive and so radical, Jane Austen’s books are timeless and have never dated because she transcends the social conventions of her time.

Having read Pride and Prejudice several times, on each reading, I’ve always noticed something new. Some of Kelly’s observations focus on things I’ve previously noticed in the text, but I certainly did not draw the same conclusions; lacking the deeper knowledge of the specific political, social and cultural context of the times in which Jane Austen was writing. I found some of Kelly’s conclusions shocking and disturbing.

This radicalism of Jane Austen’s, Kelly argues, lies at the very heart of why she is set apart, and so special – a radicalism you can feel without even being able to specify it, a lack of superficial predictability and conventional presumptions behind her tone and plots, involving things like snobbery, slavery and laws of female inheritance.

Kelly’s analysis of Mansfield Park makes it sound like a coded wartime top secret tract about slavery and the Church of England. Sometimes I found myself thinking Kelly may be reading too much into Jane Austen’s novels, for instance, the hidden mercenary agenda of Mr Knightly in Emma.

An intriguing question raised by Kelly is this: How much of a disconnect is there between ‘who a writer truly is’, as shown within their writing, ‘how they appear to be’, to family members, friends and acquaintances during their lifetime – and ‘how they choose to show themselves to others’ too. As I read Kelly’s book, I came to feel we could not trust Cassandra either. Just because she was “close” to Jane, doesn’t means she understood all of Jane’s heart and who she truly was.

Finally, when I finished this book, I felt our only sure and certain evidence is within Jane Austen’s novels themselves. And different readers can choose to interpret them differently, on many diverse levels, according to their own perceptiveness, background, and life experience. You can blind yourself to what Jane Austen says because it is too uncomfortable – or you can wilfully misinterpret it.

With this in mind, I was delighted to find fellow-author Ruth Leigh had chosen, for her next literary project, to write a series of Jane Austen short stories focusing on minor characters in the novels. The first in the series, A Great Deal of Ingenuity, is a collection of Pride and Prejudice short stories, which is published by Resolute Books very soon and I have already placed my pre-order.

BLURB

The pages of Pride and Prejudice sparkle with household names. Proud Darcy
and prejudiced Elizabeth, book-loving Mr Bennet, the snobbish Bingley sisters,
predatory Mr Wickham and oily Mr Collins.
But what about all the other people busy cooking, mending, flirting, walking
and socialising in the background?
In this entertaining collection of short stories, Ruth Leigh shines a light on the
lives of nine characters from the novel. For instance, how is married life at
Hunsford for Mr and Mrs Collins? Will mousy Maria Lucas ever find a
husband? How does Sally the maid feel about mending Lydia’s worked muslin
gown? Which Meryton matron will triumph in luring a respectable and
marriageable young man into their parlour? These stories give the reader a
window into the worlds of Meryton, Rosings Park, Pemberley and Hunsford as
you’ve never seen them before.

Knowing as I do how perceptive Ruth Leigh is, within the pages of her books published so far, I am expecting many fresh nuances and insights among all the sparkle!

Ruth is a novelist and freelance writer, the author of the Isabella M Smugge
series, contemporary humorous page-turners. She lives in rural Suffolk with three children, one husband, and a cat. Ruth has been an Austen devotee since the age of fifteen and is a proud member of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Nerd community. You can find her on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Twitter at ruthleighwrites and at her website, http://www.ruthleighwrites.co.uk.

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