Mansfield Park, a novel set amongst the landed gentry of Britain, has long been thought by some scholars to essentially endorse a patriarchal status quo. On the contrary, a careful interrogation of the text, informed by an anti-colonialist lens, establishes that Mansfield Park contains a cloaked yet pointed condemnation of imperialism. The current critical conversation, however, does not adequately address Austen's allusions to Ireland.
     Early in the novel, the Bertram girls ask Fanny Price "which way she would go to get to Ireland." Fanny's response that she would "cross to the Isle of Wight," contextualizes the struggle against empire. She is saying that the Bertrams shouldn't go to Ireland at all--but tellingly, she is then derided as "ignorant."
     But this is merely prelude to the Sotherton episode in the novel. On the journey out -- we might almost say "on the expedition" -- Julia Bertram sits beside Henry Crawford on the barouche-box. He "entertains" her with some anecdotes about an "old Irish groom" of his uncle's.  Henry's bigoted remarks are not necessary to move the plot along. Austen could easily have come up with an alternative topic for Henry.  Julia joins in the laughter at the expense of a man who is both an immigrant and a subordinate. 
     Having unmistakably established her theme, Austen includes a pointed (but hitherto overlooked) reference to the sufferings of the Irish peasantry when Maria Bertram comments on the miserable dwellings around Sotherton: "Here begins the village. Those cottages are really a disgrace." Her callous remark is followed by an impossible-to-miss (although everyone has missed it) reference to the Catholic Question: "the church spire is reckoned remarkably handsome." Maria's triumphal remark underscores the discourses of power around the Anglican Church and the subsumption of Irish identity. 
      Thus the journey from Mansfield Park to Sotherton is established as a symbolic re-enactment of the conquest of Ireland, with Henry Crawford laughing as he revels in English hegemony. 
       Austen pointedly tells us that the manor house at Sotherton was built in the time of Queen Elizabeth the First. Readers are directed to cast their minds back to the age of Good Queen Bess, when the English were aggressively extending their control over Ulster and other Irish territories.  Austen brings up the subject of Ireland again in the manor chapel. We see the colonial landscape paralleled and echoed with the interiority of domestic space when Mary Crawford speaks patronizingly of the former "Mrs. Bridgets" who used to pray there. Bridget is unmistakably an Irish/Gaelic name. The name "Bridget" does not appear anywhere else in Austen. 
        The manor-house at Sotherton is so large, Austen pointedly tells us, that most of the rooms are good only for government revenue in the form of the window tax. Why mention the government while touring a stately English home, unless to reference the depredations of empire?  While Mrs. Rushworth complacently boasts of the "loyal efforts" of her ancestors in serving English kings and queens, we are told that "Henry Crawford was looking grave and shaking his head at the windows." Henry's imperializing gaze looks "across a lawn," and beyond that, to "tall iron palisades and gates." The introduction of the idea of palisades and gates in what is supposedly a serene and peaceful English landscape should give us a faint sense of unease. Why does Austen use the term "palisade," connoting as it does the idea of defense, of being besieged, under attack? Why not "wall" or "enclosure"?
     Nothing is an accident in Austen. What do palisades have to do with Ireland? Rather a lot, actually. Palisades derives from the Latin "pale," as in "beyond the pale," an expression which has lingered in our language to the present day. It refers to the territory held by the earliest Norman invaders in Ireland. Going "beyond the pale" meant venturing beyond the safety of the palisade to the Irish wilderness beyond.
​     Once the young people venture beyond the safe enclosure around the house, they find themselves in the "Wilderness." The wilderness inevitably recalls characteristic portrays of the Irish people as wild, uncouth, lawless  savages. The wilderness has potency as both substance and symbol.
    While walking in the Wilderness, Mary Crawford urges Edmund to join the army -- the same army which brutally crushed an Irish uprising in 1798.  By never mentioning the Irish conquest directly, Austen places it everywhere in the narrative.

  Austen emphasizes the geographical as well as the psychological distance between Mansfield and Sotherton by telling us that the journey to Sotherton takes Fanny farther outside of Mansfield than she has ever been before and she "was soon beyond her knowledge." The landscape of Sotherton metaphorically represents a terra incognita, in which the young people chase around after each other, unable to obtain what they truly want.
     To the British, Ireland was seen as a strange, wild, foreign place. As well, Ireland was a place in need of "improvement." Charles Dickens, for example, approved of the Act of Union between England and Ireland on the grounds that Ireland "had been getting on very ill by itself." As Rushworth says, “It wants improvement, ma’am, beyond anything. I never saw a place that wanted so much improvement in my life."  
      Austen's repeated and ironic use of "improvement" suggests she is referencing Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1812 Address to the Irish People: "There is no doubt but the world is going wrong, or rather that it is very capable of being much improved... Society is produced by the wants, Government by the wickedness, and a state of just and happy equality, by the improvement and reason of man... What I mean by this improvement is, the inducement of a more equal and general diffusion of happiness and liberty." Thus Austen, with double-edged meaning, condemns the "improvement" of English rapacity while pointing to Godwinian anarchism as the antidote to colonialism.
     After their walk in the wilderness, Mary, Edmund and Fanny return to the house to "lounge away" the time until dinner "with chit-chat, and Quarterly Reviews." The Quarterly Review was a conservative periodical, favored by politicians who were opposed to Catholic Emancipation. By characterizing the Review as something only fit to lounge away the time with, intellectually on a par with "chit chat," we can practically see Austen's lip curling in a sneer. This was a particularly daring thrust, as the Quarterly Review was the flagship publication of John Murray, her own publisher. Was Murray so incensed by Austen's speaking truth to power, that he declined to send Mansfield Park out to literary magazines? Can this be the reason why the novel received no reviews? We can only speculate. But really, no other interpretation seems possible.
    Austen tells us that Mrs. Norris "obtained" some cream cheese and pheasants' eggs.  Mrs. Norris falsely represents her ill-gotten gains as being pressed upon her by the housekeeper: ("I stood out as long as I could.") But the cream cheese is a form of forced tribute. It is not insignificant that cheese is created by pressing curds into a mold; the associations with force, conformity, and violence, are unsettling.
     The Bertrams, Crawfords, and Mrs. Norris hastily decamp from Sotherton as soon as is decently possible after eating a hearty dinner. They figuratively represent the absentee landlords of Ireland who use the rents from their Irish holdings to maintain their lifestyles back in England. ​        

   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. [Update: here is another parody for April Fool's Day]

   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