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.Īnd yet, Kelly's claims on originality and radical readings of Austen are not generally borne out. 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. 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. 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. Those military camps, near the Bennet estate and at Brighton, are not there to entertain Lydia Bennet, but to guard against French invasion.

Pride and Prejudice, for example, is set against the steady din of war. Indeed, Kelly does an excellent job of locating them within their specific milieux. 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.”

Jane austen secret radical