Reading between the lines | 26 January 2017

Writing to her sister Cassandra about Pride and Prejudice in January 1813, Jane Austen declared, in a parody of Walter Scott: ‘I do not write for such dull Elves/As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.’ That identification of the good Austen reader as one continually on the qui vive, ready to piece out the novels’ nudges, winks and silences, also underpins Helena Kelly’s ambitiously revisionist new study of Austen — a study that is by turns illuminating, provocative and infuriating. ‘We’re missing something,’ she argues with reference to Northanger Abbey. That sentence, both in its content and in the position it adopts with relation to its readers, could stand as a motto for the whole of the book, both its strengths and its weaknesses. Kelly offers a salutary argument for reading Austen’s novels with the serious attentiveness they invite and deserve, but frequently overstates the condition of collective intellectual somnolence from which she’s trying to rescue us.

Austen’s works are particularly fitted for the kind of treatment that Kelly gives them, since, when set alongside many later 19th-century novels, they might appear comparatively light on direct historical and political references: the Jacobite rebellions and Chartist agitations that feature in Scott and Gaskell are noticeable by their absence. However, Austen criticism has long since ceased to treat these absences as signs that the novels are uninterested in the upheavals of the times in which they take place; rather, these are texts that trust their original readers to pick up on the ways in which the most oblique glance at the world beyond the fiction — a volume of Cowper, say, or a bottle of Madeira — can let much larger cultural stories into the frame.

So far so good, and the strongest parts of Kelly’s study come in her eagle-eyed revisitings of the novels.