![]() ![]() In “Jane Austen: The Secret Radical,” she brings up the heavy armory of historical research and close reading to assert that Jane’s novels are “not an undifferentiated procession of witty ironical stories about romance and drawing rooms.” Defenders hastened to point out the soldiers who cause so much excitement in “Pride and Prejudice.” Helena Kelly goes much farther. Some 20th-century critics objected to her lack of attention to these extraordinary times, especially to the Napoleonic wars. Her six novels were published between 18, a momentous era when Britain, having already lost its American colonies, was almost constantly at war abroad and grinding through the world’s first industrial revolution and an agricultural revolution at home. ![]() She focused on “two or three families living in the country,” delineating them with the precision of a miniaturist painting on ivory with the finest brush, Mocking this popular form, Jane Austen set out on a new and different realist path. Among them Ann Radcliffe’s “Mysteries of Udolfo” was enormously popular, not least with Catherine Morland, heroine of Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey.” Reading it convinced her its tropes were being re-enacted in General Tilney’s home. ![]() Most importantly, there were masses of gothic novels. ![]()
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