Superb and long-overdue reevaluation of Jane Austen and the context in which she wrote her beloved novels. For many people, I imagine “radical” is the word in the title that lifts eyebrows; for me, it’s the word “secret.” Austen’s politics have always felt clear on the page, and this is how I’ve read her, even lacking some of the well-researched context Helena Kelly provides here.
I understand romance readers, myself included, who get tetchy at the suggestion that the romance genre is inferior, and a book must earn in its way into the canon by being Serious and Important. But I also stand by my conviction that Jane Austen wrote only one romance—Pride and Prejudice—and had to warp all societal conventions to do it, and it’s important to understand why. She is first and foremost a political writer to me, and however you read her endings, the domestic is political, who we’re permitted or forbidden to love is political. When Kelly agrees that Austen deserves to be in the same conversation as Mary Wollstonecraft or Thomas Paine, I cheer.
Pull quotes ⚭
The general quotes are below; the quotes that apply specifically to the context of the novels are listed with each novel: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion.
We’re perfectly willing to accept that writers like Wordsworth were fully engaged with everything that was happening and to find the references in their work, even when they’re veiled or allusive. But we haven’t been willing to do it with Jane’s work. We know Jane; we know that however delicate her touch she’s essentially writing variations of the same plot, a plot that wouldn’t be out of place in any romantic comedy of the last two centuries.
We know wrong.
Saddled with a monarch who was periodically insane, and an heir to the throne who was not only dissolute and expensive to run but had also illegally married a Catholic widow, the British state was under enormous strain even before the war with France began. The war, for many years, went badly for Britain. French armies marched through Europe; French ships menaced Britain’s trade; the fear of invasion was constant. People who criticized the behavior of the royal family, or complained about corrupt parliamentary elections, who turned away from the Church of England or asked whether those in power should really keep it, were perceived as betraying their country in its hour of need. To question one aspect of the way society worked was to attempt to undermine the whole.
In the process, Britain began to look more and more like a totalitarian state, with the unpleasant habits that totalitarian states acquire. Habeas corpus—the centuries-old requirement that any detention be publicly justified—was suspended. Treason was redefined. It was no longer limited to actively conspiring to overthrow and to kill; it included thinking, writing, printing, reading.
It’s impossible for anyone to write thousands upon thousands of words and reveal nothing of how she thinks or what she believes. And, contrary to popular opinion, Jane did reveal her beliefs, not just about domestic life and relationships, but about the wider political and social issues of the day.
But when she was writing, she was anticipating that her readers would understand how to read between the lines, how to mine her books for meaning, just as readers in Communist states learned how to read what writers had to learn how to write. Jane’s novels were produced in a state that was, essentially, totalitarian. She had to write with that in mind. The trick was never to be too explicit, too obvious, never to have a sentence or a paragraph to which someone could point and say, “Look, there—it’s there you criticize the state, it’s there you say that marriage traps women, that the Church is crammed with hypocrites, that you promote breaking society’s rules.”
Mansfield Park, alone of all her books, wasn’t reviewed on publication. This, as I will show, is because it was an inescapably political novel, from the title onward—a “fanatical novel” that continually forced its readers to confront the Church of England’s complicity in slavery.
Jane talks in one letter about wanting readers who have “a great deal of ingenuity,” who will read her carefully. In wartime, in a totalitarian regime, and in a culture that took the written word far more seriously than we do, she could have expected to find them. Jane expected to be read slowly—perhaps aloud, in the evenings, or over a period of weeks as each volume was borrowed in turn from the circulating library. She expected that her readers would think about what she wrote, would even discuss it with each other.
She never expected to be read the way we read her, gulped down as escapist historical fiction, fodder for romantic fantasies. Yes, she wanted to be enjoyed; she wanted people to feel as strongly about her characters as she did herself. But for Jane a story about love and marriage wasn’t ever a light and frothy confection.
The four of her brothers who became fathers produced, between them, thirty-three children. Three of those brothers lost a wife to complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Another of Jane’s sisters-in-law collapsed and died suddenly at the age of thirty-six; it sounds very much as if the cause might have been the rupturing of an ectopic pregnancy, which was, then, impossible to treat.
Jane’s novels aren’t romantic. But it’s become increasingly difficult for readers to see this.
It’s hard; it requires an effort for most readers to blink those images away, to be able to see Edward Ferrars cutting up a scissor case (a scene that arguably carries a strong suggestion of sexual violence) rather than the 1990s heartthrob Hugh Grant nervously rearranging the china ornaments on the mantelpiece. By the time you’ve seen Colin-Firth-as-Mr.-Darcy poised to dive into a lake fifty times, it’s made a synaptic pathway in your brain. Indeed, I’d question whether we can get away from that, certainly how we do.
And this ought to concern us, because a lot of the images—like the images on the banknote—are simplistic, and some of them are plain wrong. Pemberley isn’t on the scale of the great ducal mansion at Chatsworth; Captain Wentworth doesn’t buy Kellynch Hall for Anne as a wedding present at the end of Persuasion; the environs of Highbury, the setting for Emma, aren’t a golden pastoral idyll. We have, really, very little reason to believe that Jane was in love with Tom Lefroy. But each image colors our understanding in some way or another, from Henry Austen’s careful portrait of his sister as an accidental author to Curtis Sittenfeld’s updated Pride and Prejudice, set in suburban Cincinnati.
The effect of all of them together is to make us read novels that aren’t actually there.
Jane’s novels, in truth, are as revolutionary, at their heart, as anything that Wollstonecraft or Tom Paine wrote. But by and large, they’re so cleverly crafted that unless readers are looking in the right places—reading them in the right way—they simply won’t understand.
Jane wasn’t a genius—inspired, unthinking; she was an artist. She compared herself to a miniature painter; in her work every stroke of the brush, every word, every character name and every line of poetry quoted, every location, matters.
Northanger Abbey contains a lengthy passage about history, about its blend of fact and fiction. The naive heroine, Catherine Morland, states an undoubted truth, that “a great deal” of history is made up: “The speeches that are put into the heroes’ mouths, their thoughts and designs—the chief of all this must be invention.” The older and more intelligent Eleanor Tilney, who reads history chiefly for pleasure, expresses herself “very well contented to take the false with the true.” For Jane herself, though, fiction isn’t simply an enjoyable embellishment. It can offer deeper truths than fact. It’s in fiction, Jane says, that we should look for “the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties.”