Books by Helena Kelly
In 2017 – the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s death – the Bank of England will release a new £10 not... more In 2017 – the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s death – the Bank of England will release a new £10 note with her face on it. Except it isn’t her face. It’s the idealized portrait which was commissioned for a family memoir published fifty years after her death. In it, Jane looks richer, prettier, and far less forbidding than she does in the unfinished sketch it’s based on. In the background of the note is a picture of Godmersham House, in Kent. But Jane didn’t live there. Godmersham belonged to one of her six brothers, who was adopted by distant relatives, and Jane was only ever a visitor. On the other side of the note is a picture of the table on which, according to unsupported family tradition, Jane wrote, and a quotation from Pride and Prejudice: “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!” – a line spoken by a character who shortly afterwards yawns and throws her book aside.
The design encapsulates many of the misconceptions about Jane which have sunk deeply into our cultural consciousness. It offers a false picture of her, and of what she writes about. Her novels don’t confine themselves to grand houses and her aim wasn’t just to offer her readers enjoyment. She writes about serious subjects and her books are deeply subversive. We just don’t read her properly. And what is more, we haven’t been reading her properly for most of the past two hundred years. Jane Austen, the Secret Radical will put that right.
Papers by Helena Kelly
Critical editions by Helena Kelly
This 1796 novel is an important example of early political writing by a woman. Although ostensibl... more This 1796 novel is an important example of early political writing by a woman. Although ostensibly a romance, the novel was one of the first to engage directly with the radical politics of Ireland in the 1790s. Ned Evans is a rags-to-riches hero, whose early existence in poverty in Wales is dramatically changed when he saves the beautiful Lady Cecilia Rivers from an assault and is invited to Ireland by her father. After spending time with the great and the good of Irish society, Evans travels to America where his fortunes once more reverse and he is captured and enslaved by American Indians, before escaping back to Ireland. There his aristocratic Irish roots are finally identified, allowing him and Cecilia to marry. Evans's subsequent transformation of his estate into a United Irish haven of peace and harmony would have been strikingly at odds with the realities of the day, and shows the author's strong sympathy for the United Irish cause.
Chapters in books by Helena Kelly
Talks by Helena Kelly
The text of the talk I gave at the Marilyn Butler and the War of Ideas conference at Chawton Hous... more The text of the talk I gave at the Marilyn Butler and the War of Ideas conference at Chawton House Library, 11th-12th December 2015.
There is a strange reluctance among literary critics to accept that anyone other than John Clare ... more There is a strange reluctance among literary critics to accept that anyone other than John Clare and – perhaps – Oliver Goldsmith, touches on the subject of enclosure in novels or poetry. In The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place John Barrell maintains that Clare’s enclosure poetry is somehow an aberration in literary history, that Clare 'was writing himself out of the main stream of European literature' (188).
But I suggest that this is quite wrong. Certainly during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there is a strong literary current towards enclosure. Contrary to the critical orthodoxy poets and novelists – some canonical, some more obscure – return again and again to enclosure and agricultural improvement. Robert Southey was preoccupied with property and land ownership, enclosure and colonisation, for more than a decade.
In the preface to Desmond, published in 1792, Charlotte Smith defends her novel’s political theme... more In the preface to Desmond, published in 1792, Charlotte Smith defends her novel’s political theme, asking why women are said to have ‘no business with politics … have they no interest in the scenes that are acting around them, in which they have fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, or friends engaged!?’
I want, today, to look at Smith’s treatment of the scene in which two of her sons were engaged, the East India Company and to suggest that in her second novel – Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake, published in 1789 – she adapts for her own feminist ends some of the rhetoric and imagery which was being used about India, and about the Company during the early years of the trial of Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of India, who was impeached, in 1787, for extortion, corruption and maladministration.
Thesis Chapters by Helena Kelly
Between the beginning of the wars between Britain and France in 1793 and their end in 1815 more t... more Between the beginning of the wars between Britain and France in 1793 and their end in 1815 more than three million acres of wastes, commons, and heaths were enclosed. This figure equates to just under five thousand square miles, an area about one tenth the size of England. The politics of space: enclosure in English literature, 1789-1815 focuses on that period of intensive wartime enclosure, offering the first sustained examination of literary responses to enclosure during the quarter of a century when the process was at its height. Challenging the Marxist paradigm which has come to dominate study of the enclosures, it demonstrates the pervasiveness of enclosure and its associated imagery in the cultural economy of wartime England. Using recent accessible analyses of the enclosures, this thesis offers new approaches to established and more marginalized writers, revealing them as observers of local enclosure and as participants in a wide-ranging discourse about its repercussions for the nation. It shows how, in The Emigrants and The Old Manor House, Charlotte Smith abandons the pastoral topoi of her earlier Elegiac Sonnets for an unblinking assessment of the need for change in the countryside. It reads the early poetry of William Wordsworth as an attempt to negotiate the personal resonance that enclosure held for him and suggests that Robert Southey’s Madoc can be most successfully interpreted as a poem about the overlapping rhetorics of enclosure and colonization, and their shared moral failure. Finally, by detailing the criticism of enclosure which can be found in Mansfield Park, Emma and Northanger Abbey, it reaffirms Jane Austen as a novelist with a social conscience. The politics of space casts both the enclosures and the wartime literature of England in a new light, challenging orthodox critical assessments of this period of revolutionary rural change.
Uploads
Books by Helena Kelly
The design encapsulates many of the misconceptions about Jane which have sunk deeply into our cultural consciousness. It offers a false picture of her, and of what she writes about. Her novels don’t confine themselves to grand houses and her aim wasn’t just to offer her readers enjoyment. She writes about serious subjects and her books are deeply subversive. We just don’t read her properly. And what is more, we haven’t been reading her properly for most of the past two hundred years. Jane Austen, the Secret Radical will put that right.
Papers by Helena Kelly
Critical editions by Helena Kelly
Chapters in books by Helena Kelly
Talks by Helena Kelly
But I suggest that this is quite wrong. Certainly during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there is a strong literary current towards enclosure. Contrary to the critical orthodoxy poets and novelists – some canonical, some more obscure – return again and again to enclosure and agricultural improvement. Robert Southey was preoccupied with property and land ownership, enclosure and colonisation, for more than a decade.
I want, today, to look at Smith’s treatment of the scene in which two of her sons were engaged, the East India Company and to suggest that in her second novel – Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake, published in 1789 – she adapts for her own feminist ends some of the rhetoric and imagery which was being used about India, and about the Company during the early years of the trial of Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of India, who was impeached, in 1787, for extortion, corruption and maladministration.
Thesis Chapters by Helena Kelly
The design encapsulates many of the misconceptions about Jane which have sunk deeply into our cultural consciousness. It offers a false picture of her, and of what she writes about. Her novels don’t confine themselves to grand houses and her aim wasn’t just to offer her readers enjoyment. She writes about serious subjects and her books are deeply subversive. We just don’t read her properly. And what is more, we haven’t been reading her properly for most of the past two hundred years. Jane Austen, the Secret Radical will put that right.
But I suggest that this is quite wrong. Certainly during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there is a strong literary current towards enclosure. Contrary to the critical orthodoxy poets and novelists – some canonical, some more obscure – return again and again to enclosure and agricultural improvement. Robert Southey was preoccupied with property and land ownership, enclosure and colonisation, for more than a decade.
I want, today, to look at Smith’s treatment of the scene in which two of her sons were engaged, the East India Company and to suggest that in her second novel – Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake, published in 1789 – she adapts for her own feminist ends some of the rhetoric and imagery which was being used about India, and about the Company during the early years of the trial of Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of India, who was impeached, in 1787, for extortion, corruption and maladministration.