The publicists didn’t help by branding the book as revolutionary; many of its ideas can be found in that neglected body of scholarship. It is a shame that Kelly doesn’t leave much room for Austen’s bitingly funny letters and juvenilia, both of which can leave no reader in doubt of Austen’s disposition toward the satirical, the radical and, more often than not, the grotesque. She decides that Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility is probably the biological father of the young woman Willoughby has seduced. It might help you to understand some of the influences that affected Jane’s writings which might lead to a greater enjoyment of her work, but it is also possible that you might not like everything you discover. Sex caused pregnancy, and death was just as much a part of pregnancy as ending up with a baby at the end.

I'm not sure I agree with Kelly on any of her basic assertions but reading this book made me want to go back, reread all of Austen's books and look for Kelly's claims while doing so. Despite leading a private, mostly rural life, Austen was well informed and lived in a family that read and thought widely, a family that argued ideas over the dinner table. In Northanger Abbey, published after Austen's death and years too late for the audience it was intended for--readers who were well versed in the Gothic novel of the 1790s--Kelly sees "The Anxieties of Common Life. It felt like she was working too hard to make Jane Austen's works fit the "secret radical" image, choosing the most cynical, negative interpretations possible.The point readers have traditionally assumed is that the girls have yet to learn the moral self-control Fanny has acquired at Mansfield Park, not that they are prepared (armed by Fanny) to slit their father’s throat.

Other Austen fans might feel differently as this is certainly very well written and contains much that is of interest - but eventually I just lost the will to finish it I'm afraid. While the organization of this book connects each novel to a separate issue, I felt she overlapped several issues and may have been better served looking at issues for what they were, not isolating them to each novel. Knightly doesn’t actually love Emma, he only wants control over Hartford, so that he can enforce more enclosures of the land. It seems improbable that, however clear-sighted an interpreter she is, Kelly is the first to see what the great novelist was really up to. There was some interesting background info on the social issues of the time, but I did not agree with all the conclusions drawn.Many of the negative reviewers seem to believe they are being individually condescended to by Helena's assertion that they've read Jane wrong. Jane Austen, the Secret Radical made me rethink my relationship to Jane's work - and this considering I spent an entire semester in a Jane Austen seminar with Helena - which I think is the book's stated intention, so in this it was resoundingly successful for me. Some 30 years ago, in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Marilyn Butler placed Austen within the ideological disputes of her day and discovered a novelist who was a conservative and a Christian, sharply opposed to the liberal and “Jacobin” novels of her youth. It is notable that, alone of her novels, Mansfield Park was never reviewed on publication; if we miss the significance of Austen’s most openly radical and anti-establishment novel, it seems clear that her intended audience did not. It made me realize the very thorough work that went into this book, as well as her gift for close reading.