An illuminating reassessment of the life and work of Jane Austen that makes clear how Austen has been misread for the past two centuries and how she intended her books to be read. In Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, Helena Kelly, dazzling Jane Austen authority, looks at the writer and her work in the context of Austen's own time to reveal this popular, beloved artist as daring, even subversive in reaction to her roiling world and to show, novel by novel, how Austen imbued her books with radical, sometimes revolutionary idaes - on slavery, poverty, feminism and marriage as trapping women, on the Church, and evolution. We see that Austen was writing in a time when revolution was in the air (she was born the year before the American Revolution; the French Revolution began when she was thirteen). England had become a totalitarian state; Britian was at war with France. Habeas corpus had been suspended; treason, redefined, was no longer limited to actively conspiring to overthrow and to kill. It now included thinking, writing, printing, and reading (Tom Paine was convicted of seditious libel in 1792 for ideas considered dangerous to the state), the intention being to pressure writers and publishers to police themselves; those who criticized the government or who turned away from the Church of England were seen as betraying their country in its hour of need. In this revelatory, brilliant book, Kelly discusses each of Austen's novels in the order in which they were written. Whether writing about the fundamental unfairness of primogeniture in Sense and Sensibility (influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Women) or about property and inheritance, war, revolution and counterrevolution in Pride and Prejudice (Kelly describes the novel as a revolutionary fairy tale written in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France) or about Mansfield Park, with its issues of slavery and the hypocrisy of the Church of England, we see Austen not as someone creating a procession of undifferentiated romances but as someone whose novels reflect back to her readers the world as it is - and was then - complicated, messy, and filled with error and injustice. We see a writer who understood the novel - seen as mindless "trash"--Could be a great art form and who, perhaps more than any other writer up to that time, imbued it with its particular greatness. And finally we see Austen - the writer; the artist; the serious, ambitious, clear-sighted woman "of information"--fully aware of what was going on in the world around her, clear about what it and to quietly, artfully make her ideas known. -- from dust jacket.