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{"id":18647,"date":"2017-01-27T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-27T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=370"},"modified":"2017-01-27T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-01-27T00:00:00","slug":"yo-great-grandmas-austen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2017\/01\/yo-great-grandmas-austen\/","title":{"rendered":"Yo’ Great-Grandma’s Austen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I<\/span>n her TLS<\/em> review<\/a> of new books about Jane Austen, Devoney Looser comments on the irony that we think of Austen as a truthful, i.e., \u201cfactual,\u201d novelist, a reporter of life as it was. <\/p>\n

In fact, \u201cAusten\u2019s writings rarely fetishize facts. Her early foray into history writing famously describes itself as the work of a partial, prejudiced and ignorant historian. Austen humorously boasts to her readers that her history will contain very few dates. That manuscript, \u2018The History of England,\u2019 will be part of a featured display at the British Library this year, in honour of the bicentenary of Austen\u2019s death.\u201d Austen\u2019s work is marked by an \u201cunapologetic acknowledgement that her own stories are fabricated.\u201d She calls them \u201cnovels,\u201d and Looser shows that she had other, less explicit, terms to choose from.<\/p>\n

The best part of the review is Looser\u2019s dissection of Helena Kelly\u2019s Jane Austen, the Secret Radical<\/em><\/a>, which purports to present a revolutionary thesis: Austen was not a conservative<\/em>! Kelley imagines Austen\u2019s novels as \u201ca sort of propaganda machine for the imperilled early nineteenth-century Left.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the sort of thing that merits a shrug. Radical Austen has been around a long time. Looser writes, \u201cThe early twentieth-century women\u2019s suffrage movement embraced Austen, from its nonviolent to its radical branches. Many of the first playwrights, directors and actors of early Austen stage adaptations, in the 1890s and early 1900s, were or would become suffragists. Jane Austen\u2019s name was featured on a banner marched through the streets of London in a 1908 demonstration. (That banner survives in the Women\u2019s Library at the London School of Economics and Political Science.) In 1909, suffragists put Austen on stage as a character in the propaganda play A Pageant of Great Women.\u201d<\/p>\n

In short: \u201cThe radical Austen was your great grandmother\u2019s Jane Austen.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"