Helena Kelly: Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

Description

She writes about serious subjects and her books are deeply subversive. We just don't read her properly - we haven't been reading her properly for 200 years.

Jane Austen, The Secret Radical puts that right. In her first, brilliantly original book, Austen expert Helena Kelly introduces the reader to a passionate woman living in an age of revolution; to a writer who used what was regarded as the lightest of literary genres, the novel, to grapple with the weightiest of subjects - feminism, slavery, abuse, the treatment of the poor, the power of the Church, even evolution - at a time, and in a place, when to write about such things directly was seen as akin to treason.