She declares at the outset that, whatever we imagine we know about Austen – always an oddly diminishing "Jane" in this book – and her novels, "we know wrong": now, The Secret Radical will reveal the writer's true intentions, and present her novels as they were intended to be read. Surely there cannot be much left to say or discover. No other English-language writer has received such endless attention: Austen has been claimed as an arch-conservative, an arch-radical, and everything in between – especially in the last two decades, as screen adaptations turbo-charge this scrutiny. Context, indeed, is everything in Kelly's account of Austen's political and social views, and how they infuse her work. 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. “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.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |