Patricia Lee Sharpe
(A review article based on Jane Austen, The Secret Radical by Helena Kelly)
Having popped into the English Department office to register for some courses I hoped to take, I was chatting with the Chairman’s secretary when the Big Man himself burst out of his sanctum. He was waving a fistful of papers, and he was monumentally annoyed.
Only women had registered for his seminar, he grumbled. “It’s going to be a god-damned tea party!” He saw me then, but he didn’t blush.
The scene was funny and infuriating—and typical. Talk about micro aggressions!
No, it wasn’t easy to be a female graduate student in those days, not even in the gyno-ghetto of the humanities. We were, for instance, supposed to admire Ernest Hemingway the macho man as well as his muscular prose, and woe betide us if we revealed that his female characters weren’t real women so much as masturbatory phantasms. And so on. The male view was still the unchallenged norm.
Not So Trivial Pursuits
Nor did the male establishment see much to admire in the works of that reclusive weirdo poet Emily Dickinson (avoid the dreadful new movie about her) let alone the novels of Jane Austin, spinster. Austen did have a wicked way with syntax, they conceded, and her romantic plots generated blockbuster movies decade after decade, but really! Tea parties. Decorous balls. Gossip. Fluttery mothers worried about daughters making a good marriage, or a bad marriage or, worst of all, no marriage at all, which actually was no trivial matter.
Sociologist
And there’s our entry! Meet Jane Austen, sociologist, ruthlessly anatomizing her patriarchal, class-ridden society, its norms and its horrible consequences, especially for women, though younger sons had a pretty tough time, too. Surviving in the social jungle was no picnic, if you weren’t rich, landed, aristocratic and first born. As for females, an unmarried woman was pitiable, although she could own property, while a woman with a man was powerless because hubby got all her property. So life for women was lose-lose, although misery with money was obviously preferable to being poor and slammed around. Austen did a thorough job of showing the fragility of life for the middle and lower classes, too.
Economist
Which brings us to Jane Austen, the economist, sufficiently expert in nuances of property acquisition and management to show up our Trumps and Kushners for the bounders they are, the one a tasteless bling builder, the other a ruthless slum lord. In fact, Austen’s books should probably be read along with tomes like The Wealth of Nations, to understand how the economic system worked at the day-to-day level: how wealth was accumulated, increased, preserved and used to personal advantage as the industrial world was dawning. The novel Emma is like a treatise on the effects of the enclosure acts on British society, according to Kelly. After you’ve read Kelly’s study, Mr. Knightly will never seem so attractive again. As for the wholly admirable Mr. Bingley in Pride and Prejudice, having made his money in business, he’s no gentleman—which doesn’t discredit him in Austen’s eyes. She conveys to us very clearly the snobbery, pretension and viciousness of the class system of her day.
Political Scientist
Men! How could so many of them have failed to perceive the extent to which Jane Austen’s novels hinge on the vulnerabilities of England during the Napoleonic Wars? Fears of a French invasion caused defensive military units to be quartered around the country. The resulting inundation of small towns by unprincipled young officers created havoc in local society, as in Pride and Prejudice, where captains and commodores become prime dinner guests and war talk dominates dinner discussions. Kelly reveals to us a novelist wholly aware that England has become a thoroughly militarized society whose rural verities are being challenged by colonial complications and international anxieties.
Theologian
Speaking of colonial complications, although England’s evangelical Christians were at the forefront of nineteenth century efforts to abolish slavery, the Anglican establishment wasn’t so noble, evidently. Wealth derived from the slave-based sugar islands in the Caribbean underpinned the fortunes of the Church and much of the upper class. According to Kelly’s analysis, Austen’s Mansfield Park is virtually a tract on crafty anti-abolitionism. What’s more, although Austen’s novels abound in curates and other ecclesiastical notables, most of them are slimy, opportunistic hypocrites. Think of Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice. Within the whole of Austen’s oeuvre, Kelly notes, there is only one admirable cleric, and that a merely mentioned character in Sense and Sensibility. Was Austen’s condemnation of the whole class accidental? Probably not. She was the daughter of a clergyman.
While warming up to her subject in Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, Helena Kelly writes: “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....But we haven’t been willing to do it with Jane’s work.”
Many of us have sensed the need for a more penetrating look at Jane Austen’s portrait of her times. Helena Kelly has done the analysis. Give Austen’s novels another read. See how much the sexy movies have edited out.
(Note: Kelly should have referred to her subject as "Austen," not "Jane.")