“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.”
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. 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.
It is against such contexts that Helena Kelly builds her case in Jane Austen, The Secret Radical. Context, indeed, is everything in Kelly's account of Austen's political and social views, and how they infuse her work. 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. Surely there cannot be much left to say or discover.
Kelly thinks there is. 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.
Indeed, Kelly does an excellent job of locating them within their specific milieux. Pride and Prejudice, for example, is set against the steady din of war. Those military camps, near the Bennet estate and at Brighton, are not there to entertain Lydia Bennet, but to guard against French invasion. Kelly points out the dangers of such places: the filth, the prostitution, the physical and sexual violence; she emphasises the fact (as the "wary" Austen, writing in dangerous political times, naturally could not) that Elizabeth, so fond of her long independent walks, prudently ceases to ramble alone once the militia arrive in the district.
The Secret Radical also illuminates the social labyrinths the Bennet girls were expected to traverse as they sought suitable husbands; and underscores the audacity of Austen's plot when set against contemporary values. Elizabeth and Darcy, after all, were never formally connected – first the gentleman and then the lady flatly decline the all-important ceremonious introduction – meaning that throughout the book, their entire relationship remains socially void. Kelly's point – and it is a good one, and powerfully made – is that both parties were thus behaving radically; and that in creating such a scandalous scenario, so too was their creator.
And yet, Kelly's claims on originality and radical readings of Austen are not generally borne out. Too often her assertions seem strained, or to rely on circumstantial evidence; and too often, "new" claims are not new at all. In reading Mansfield Park (1814), for example, she gazes at the long shadows of slavery that lie across this novel. Kelly notes that its very title glances at a legal judgment delivered by the Earl of Mansfield in 1772, one viewed as a blow against the slave trade; and that the character of the dreadful Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park bears the same surname as Robert Norris, a notorious contemporary proponent of slavery. But such points have already been made: Mansfield and Norris were known at the time; history and scholarship have ensured that they remain known today. There is no original detective work involved in establishing these connections with Austen's novel.
Similarly, Kelly's reading of Persuasion (1818), Austen's posthumously published and sombre final work, dwells on the social changes that slice through this book: the landscape of rural and urban England are changing at breakneck speed, and the social composition of English society is changing too, with a landowning gentry giving way to a new trading meritocracy. But this has long been accepted as a most distinctive theme of Persuasion. It cannot be dressed as a discovery.
Kelly's book offers an accessible account of Austen's universe: seen in this light, it encapsulates smartly much that a frequently chintzy Austen industry would prefer to overlook. But Jane Austen's novels have been identified as truly radical – in their critique of economics, gender politics, colonialism and much more – by generations of readers. This is why they inspire such passion and attention – and it is ultimately perplexing, therefore, to encounter in The Secret Radical arguments which gloss over this fact.
