![]() ![]() ![]() Kelly’s Austen is a “radical” who resents aristocracy, despises the corruption of the Church of England and assails Burkean conservatism.Īnyone interested in Austen will begin to see some problems. These lead us into chapter-by-chapter treatment of each of the novels, revealing the importance of money in Sense and Sensibility, or the activities of the militia in Pride and Prejudice, or the possible effect of enclosures in Emma. Her confidence that she has a special knowledge of these intentions is signalled in the opening section of each of her chapters, where she provides novelistic episodes in which “Jane” (always called so in this book) ponders the lowly status of women or the effects of rural poverty or the evils of slavery. ![]() She will teach us to “read Jane’s novels … as she intended”. She will show us that, far from giving us “demure dramas in drawing rooms”, Austen used her novels to “examine the great issues of her day”. But Kelly will pierce the “haze of preconceptions” obscuring Austen’s fiction. To many they have apparently offered “a blissful, almost drugged-up break from reality”. They have been accepted as safe, escapist, conservative. ![]() She sets out to show us how Austen’s novels have been “so thoroughly, so almost universally, misunderstood”. H ave we been getting Jane Austen wrong for all these years? Helena Kelly thinks so. ![]()
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