I managed to keep the secret, and now we can announce the latest anthology of short stories from editor Christina Angela Boyd.

Rational Creatures is a collection of stories about Jane Austen's female characters. As our editor explains:

My assigned rational creature is Mrs. Clay, the "clever, insinuating, handsome woman," who tries to flatter her way into the affections of Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion. 

​I always wanted to know more about Penelope Clay's story -- why was her marriage "unprosperous"?  What was she talking about with Mr. Elliot when Mary and Anne saw her from the window of the White Hart Inn?  In my short story, all will be revealed!

Watch for the release of Rational Creatures in October of 2018!

Fanny Price or Mary Crawford — who do you like best?  Is Fanny the sweet heroine of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park or is she a two-faced wimp?  Is Mary Crawford a charming and misunderstood socialite or is she selfish and immoral? 

​Kyra C Kramer and I take up our pens in defense of these literary frenemies for a no-holds-barred debate, held over five days on the internet. Follow along and join the debate in the comments! 
​

​Monday, October 23rd: Just Jane 1813 
Tuesday, October 24th: Diary of an Eccentric 
Wednesday, October 25th: Savvy Verse and Wit
Thursday, October 26th: My Jane Austen Book Club
Friday, October 27th: Austenesque Reviews
​

   While reading Jane Austen: the Secret Radical, I had the irresistible idea of trying my own hand at writing a spoof of the type of literary criticism that Helena Kelly employs. It was surprisingly easy -- I had my parodies, published below, written in under an hour.

   Modern literary criticism contains two basic elements: One, drawing connections between disparate things in the book which have no obvious relevance to the plot or the theme to find symbolism where none was intended. This is an especially clever technique because it is non-falsifiable. You can pronounce that some inanimate object in the book is freighted with meaning, and nobody can dig the author up out of her grave to contradict you.

    Secondly, investing classic literature with overtones of modern attitudes towards sex, gender identity, colonialism, imperialism, race and intersectionalism.
    Consider the picnic on Box Hill in Emma. We modern readers can't help thinking about the servants preparing, carrying and setting out the meal, and then waiting respectfully at a distance while the ladies and gentlemen sat and ate it, and then cleaning up after the ladies and gentlemen when they were all finished with their nice al fresco repast. But none of that is mentioned in the novel, only a brief reference to servants and carriages at the end of the passage. To Austen, servants were a fact of life.

Half of the following excerpts are from Helena Kelly's Jane Austen: the Secret Radical and half are parodies that I have written. She is quite serious, and I am just kidding. Can you tell which are which? Give your answers in the comments below!

1.  ​Then, too, an astonishing proportion of the surnames in Sense and Sensibility are metallic ones. We have the Steele sisters. We have the Ferrars family (that is, ferrous, containing iron). Willoughby’s rich cousin is called Mrs. Smith—a common name, true, and one that Jane uses in three separate novels, but nevertheless a smith is a worker of metal. Willoughby marries an heiress called Miss Grey, recalling the jeweler Gray’s; the sharing of names is something we’ll return to. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), a “gray” or “grey” is also a spot of discoloration that marks the flaw in a metal, particularly in a gun, and when we first encounter Willoughby, on the rainy hillside above Barton Cottage, he’s carrying a gun.

2. ​Shoes are more predominate in Emma than they are in any other of Jane's novels, although the word "shoe" itself appears only four times. This should not surprise us, for shoes both display and conceal, reveal and hide. We have Mr. Knightley with his thick leather gaiters, ​​Emma's trouble with her shoes when she is walking with Harriet and Mr. Elton. Miss Bates is obsessed with shoes and whether they have gotten damp or dirty; as a clergyman's daughter, she knew that sandals were connected in the Bible with uncleanliness. If something unpleasant is picked up in the outside world, it can be thoughtlessly discarded by the privileged class in Highbury -- Emma's bootlace is tossed into a ditch, Isabella tells her father, "I could change my shoes the moment I get home." For them, there will always be more bootlaces and shoes. The gypsies, of course, are all bare-footed.

3. ​One of Miss Bingley's favourite words is 'delighted'. She tells Elizabeth Bennet, "I hear you are quite delighted with Wickham." That word is chosen deliberately. De-lighted of course has a double meaning -- a light can be extinguished, can be put out. Wickham's name is a revelation; "wick" refers to the wick of a candle, which was, apart from firewood, the chief source of light in Jane's world. "Ham" would have reminded astute readers of Ham, the son of Noah. They would have known the bible passage describing how Ham saw the nakedness of his father when Noah was passed out drunk. If Wickham is the senior Mr. Darcy's illegitimate son, could this be the real reason why Wickham has been cast out of Pemberley – does he know unspeakable truths about his own father? Can Wickham shed light on the hidden sins of Pemberley?

4. Almost immediately we are reminded of slavery and the complicity of landowners like Sir Thomas; Mrs. Price offers up one of her sons to go to Sir Thomas's West Indian estates – that is, his sugar plantations where his slaves toiled -- and another to go to Woolwich. Woolwich was a military academy. Only a few years previously to the events in Mansfield Park, the British Army had invaded what is now Haiti, intending to brutally put down the slave uprising there.

​5. ​Mansfield Park includes repeated references to “pheasants,” game birds that were difficult to buy and that (like slaves, after the Mansfield ruling) couldn’t be legally recovered if they got away and so had to be carefully kept and carefully bred to maintain an adequate population. Jane barely mentions pheasants elsewhere in her writing.

6. ​Perhaps we’d do better to view the abrupt shifts, the gaps that open up in the text, as thematic. Persuasion features a lot of sudden drops and breaks. The words “fall” and “fell” appear more often in this short book than they do in Jane’s longer novels. The heroine Anne’s nephew falls from a tree and breaks his collarbone. Her headstrong rival in love, Louisa Musgrove, falls and cracks her skull on the Cobb at Lyme. Her father, Sir Walter, and eldest sister, Elizabeth, scrambling to maintain their social position, take a house on a street in Bath where planned building work had been halted because of landslides.

​7. Jane makes a point of telling us that Captain Harville has gathered “something curious and valuable from all the distant countries” he’s visited; he displays them in his rented house in Lyme. Are we meant to imagine that he has already added, or will add, some of the Lyme “curiosities”—fossils—to his collection? There is, too, a faintly reptilian flavor to two of the ships Captain Wentworth has sailed on—the Asp and the Laconia. “Asp” is a poetic term for a snake. Sparta, in Laconia, was associated with serpents. There were dozens of other, non-reptilian ship names Jane could have borrowed or invented, but she doesn’t.

8. But a close reading of Mansfield Park reveals how Austen really intended for us to understand Fanny – there is the public Fanny and the hidden, secret Fanny who takes refuge in the East Room. More than a hundred years before the illness was diagnosed, Jane has given us a portrait of someone with dissociative identity disorder, commonly (and inaccurately) called, having a split personality. The truth is seen -- but not fully understood -- by Mrs. Norris, who says of her: "she likes to go her own way to work…. she certainly has a little spirit of secrecy." And it is Mrs. Norris who says, "Fanny is not one of those who can talk and work at the same time." But Fanny is not merely daydreaming, she has retreated from reality entirely. The uncomfortable truths of Mansfield Park are too painful.

Click here for parts one, two and three of my review of Helena Kelly's Jane Austen: the Secret Radical

Click here for information about my novel, A Contrary Wind: a variation on Mansfield Park

    To begin with, I want to repeat some distinctions I made in part two:
Kelly is not saying [Mansfield Park] is a romantic comedy novel that I don't happen to like, because I don't happen to like Fanny and Edmund. It just didn't hit the mark for me.
    Nor is she saying, Well, books that mentioned slaves or 12-year-old girls getting married or Jewish money lenders used to be okay, in the past, but those subjects are problematic in today's world. And for some people, a book in which the main characters live off of slavery is too problematic to be read with enjoyment today. I am not going to dispute that. If you don't want to read Huck Finn, or The Merchant of Venice, or Romeo and Juliet or Mansfield Park, I think you are missing out on some great literature, but it's your choice. But, as I said, Kelly is going farther than that.
    Kelly is saying, Austen intended for her readers to regard the main characters who get married at the end of the novel -- you know, like people always do at the end of a romantic comedy -- as bad, horrible people. Mansfield Park and Emma may look like romantic comedies on the surface but they are actually condemnations of slavery and the practise of land enclosure.​

   Kelly is positively allergic to the humour in Austen. Of Knightley and Emma's happy union, Kelly writes, "the marriage itself is made possible only by criminal acts and an elderly man's terror." In case you don't recognize what she's talking about, it's a reference to this:

Mrs. Weston's poultry-house was robbed one night of all her turkeys--evidently by the ingenuity of man. Other poultry-yards in the neighbourhood also suffered.--Pilfering was housebreaking to Mr. Woodhouse's fears.--He was very uneasy; and but for the sense of his son-in-law's protection, would have been under wretched alarm every night of his life.
​
    Austen treats the theft of the poultry with mock-drama, but of course it's deadly serious to Kelly, a comedy of terrors.

    ​Slavery of course, is not funny. According to Kelly, Mansfield Park is "inescapably political," filled with veiled allusions to slavery which her contemporary readers would have understood. Yes, slavery is mentioned briefly and in passing in the novel and yes, Sir Thomas owns slaves. But that is not what the novel is about. And if some readers think I am making light of the subject of slavery in what follows, no. My intention is to make fun of over-exuberant literary detective work.
    Did you think that when Austen began Mansfield Park with the phrase, "About thirty years ago," her readers would say to themselves, 'Okay, Miss Maria Ward met Sir Thomas Bertram thirty years ago?" No! They would think about slavery!
  Her contemporary readers, upon reading the phrase, "About thirty years ago," were supposed to be instantly reminded, and mentally review, the events of the abolition campaign, the Zong case, Cowper's poem, the Haitian slave revolt, all of which transpired during the thirty years before the publication of Mansfield Park. They weren't going to think about Mozart, or how fashions had changed, or how they used to have a full head of hair back then, or how much the pound sterling was worth, or who was on the throne, they were – obviously – going to think about slavery. As you do, you know, whenever someone mentions courtships that occurred in previous decades.

​      To resume, when Fanny has a headache and Edmund gives her a glass of Madeira wine, what are we supposed to think of? Take a guess. That's right – slavery!
    Or when Mary Crawford mentions the poet, Hawkins Browne? Well, his son once went to a dinner party with Dr. Johnson and slavery was discussed at that party! And everybody knows about Dr. Johnson. (That much is true, they did).
​​   When young Julia mentions the Roman emperor Severus, what are we supposed to think about? Hint: Severus was an African. Yes, slavery!
   No, actually, Severus is mentioned in a passage which is a comedic reference to a common topic of concern at the time -- how to educate girls and how much education girls should have. Instead of didactic passages where the novel's characters sit around and talk about female education, Austen shows, rather than tells, and is poking fun at the same time:

   "But, aunt, [Fanny] is really so very ignorant!—… I am sure I should have been ashamed of myself, if I had not known better long before I was so old as she is. ... How long ago it is, aunt, since we used to repeat the chronological order of the kings of England, with the dates of their accession, and most of the principal events of their reigns!"
   "Yes," added [Julia]; "and of the Roman emperors as low as Severus; besides a great deal of the heathen mythology, and all the metals, semi-metals, planets, and distinguished philosophers."
   "Very true indeed, my dears, [says Aunt Norris], but you are blessed with wonderful memories, and your poor cousin has probably none at all…. And remember that, if you are ever so forward and clever yourselves, you should always be modest; for, much as you know already, there is a great deal more for you to learn."
   "Yes, I know there is, till I am seventeen….."
   This is a funny, brilliant passage. Are we also supposed to be thinking about slavery while we are chuckling quietly? Ah yes, we are not supposed to be laughing. 

​   And did you think Mansfield Park ends with a happy couple getting married? No!
    Timid little Fanny "has married a man who doesn't love her, who is a fool and a hypocrite." Austen has not written a hero and heroine who don't appeal to modern tastes, she deliberately wrote unlikeable main characters.
   And did you think they will live happily ever after? No! You have forgotten about the apricots!
   Here's the final, thunderously condemnatory passage in Kelly's chapter on Mansfield Park:
    Thoroughly perfect, though the Moor Park apricot tree is still in the vicarage garden, a reminder of the evil that everyone knows about but no one is willing to discuss, a tree not of knowledge, but of forgetfulness. With every spoonful of apricot jam, every apricot tart that's served up on the parsonage table, Fanny will eat the fruits of slavery.
    And the tree will keep on growing.
    Why apricots? Because Kelly claims the word "Moor" in "Moor Park" is a subtle reference to slavery that Austen's readers would instantly understand.
    "Is Jane really using this name, and this kind of apricot tree, out of all the alternatives, by accident? Is it just coincidence that it's the same word Shakespeare uses to describe the ethnicity of black Africans?"
    But of course it's not the same word, it's a homonym. The Moorpark apricot is named after a landed estate called "Moor Park." "Moor" refers not to black people but wild, windswept heaths, moors, like in Wuthering Heights. Please don't tell Kelly about the word 'niggardly,' she'll have conniptions.
    Of course, you can't make a good apricot tart without some sugar. Sugar was actually made by slaves, in horrible conditions. That's what they are making at Sir Thomas' plantation in Antigua. Hmm, the word "sugar" does not appear in Mansfield Park. Maybe if Austen had mentioned someone putting sugar in their tea, that would have been a more intelligible reference – to slavery! Easier to "get" than a homonym. But never mind, apricots = slaves.

   ​But what about the slaves? Well, for plot purposes, Austen had to have Sir Thomas go away for a long time, and she used the fact that he was on a dangerous sea voyage as one reason why the young people of Mansfield Park should not be amusing themselves with a play while their father was in peril of life or death. At the time of writing, because of the Napoleonic Wars, Sir Thomas couldn't go to Europe, so she had to give him a different destination. Slavery, which in fact is mentioned more explicitly by Jane Fairfax and Mrs. Elton in Emma, than by anyone in Mansfield Park, is simply not at the forefront of the story.

   One final oddity of Jane Austen: the Secret Radical, on which I'd like to comment, is that Kelly is elaborately cautious about making assumptions where the biographical details of Austen's life are concerned. She refuses to take the widely accepted stories at face value and in fact arrogantly accuses those who came before her of spreading "lies" about Austen. Do we know for a fact that it was First Impressions that her father offered to a publisher? Do we know for a fact that Harris Bigg-Wither proposed to Austen? No, we don't! It's just family "gossip." Did Edward Austen only give Chawton cottage to his mother and sisters because his wife had died and she could no longer object? "an intriguing coincidence, though one about which we can do no more than speculate."
    But, she makes head-shakingly blithe assumptions from clues that only she can perceive in Austen's text. For example, read this passage:
    [Henry Crawford] honoured the warm-hearted, blunt fondness of [Fanny's sailor brother William] which led [William] to say, with his hands stretched towards Fanny's head, 'Do you know, I begin to like that queer fashion already, though when I first heard of such things being done in England, I could not believe it; and when Mrs. Brown, and the other women at the Commissioner's at Gibraltar, appeared in the same trim, I thought they were mad; but Fanny can reconcile me to anything.'
    Do you conclude, as does Kelly, that the "the intensity of William's reaction suggests that we are dealing here with cropped hair and not just short front ringlets."?
    What? He's a young man saying when he first saw a new hairstyle, he thought it looked silly, but now that he sees it on his beloved sister's head, he is okay with it. What is 'intense' about that? Why does Kelly think hair has been cut, rather than styled? The expression, 'appeared in the same trim,' is a nautical expression. 'Trimming the sails,' does not mean cut the sails, right? It means adjusting them. Or is it the word 'queer'? Please tell me it's not the word 'queer' that has Kelly thinking Fanny is now wearing short hair. And in the end, Kelly does not explain what is so significant about short hair.

    Or maybe Harriet Smith is Jane Fairfax's sister because "Hetty" is the name of Jane Fairfax's grandmother. "Nothing in this book remains a mystery if we read it carefully – Harriet Smith and Jane Fairfax may well be half-sisters."
    Or maybe they are not. And if they were, why would Austen bury but not reveal the secret in Emma, a book that is filled with hints and clues that are all revealed in the end. What narrative purpose would that serve?
   Jane Austen: the Secret Radical is not about Austen's innovations as a writer, her technique, her inimitable voice, her way with dialogue, or her characters. It's about a quest to find certain opinions and points of view embedded deeply within Austen's texts. Kelly has claimed to find these secret opinions, and no doubt she is as well-intentioned as was Emma Woodhouse, when she mistakenly thought she was bringing Harriet Smith and Mr. Elton together. But Kelly's inclinations have led her astray and she has found clues that aren't there at all.
    As for me, "I do not think I am particularly quick at those sort of discoveries. I do not pretend to it. What is before me, I see."

Bonus:  in my next post, I will reproduce four paragraphs from Helena Kelly's book, along with four parodies of my own. Will you be able to tell the real Kelly analysis from the parody? Stay tuned and see for yourself!
 
My recommendations for books about Austen: 
What Matters in Jane Austen? Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved, by John Mullan
Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time, by Mary Waldron
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen, by Joan Aiken Hodge