![]() ![]() ![]() There are pluses and minuses in both directions. Of the two books, Kelly’s is more literary and Looser’s more scholarly. And Devoney Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen is a lucid and thorough account of the history of various Jane Austens that different eras and readers have constructed to support their own particular agendas. Helena Kelly’s treatise Jane Austen, the Secret Radical determinedly if haphazardly attempts to decode Austen’s novels in order to demonstrate that they contain radically progressive secret messages. That absence is the void around which two new books on Jane Austen, just released in honor of the 200th anniversary of her death, revolve. So for the past 200 years, critics have attempted to piece together an idea of who Jane Austen was and what her politics were like, all the while grappling with the difficulty of doing so when we have minimal biographical information about her and when her books appear so firmly focused on the domestic. Many of Austen’s letters and personal papers were burned after her death, and her family’s description of her as an unprepossessing but nice lady can be hard to square with the wicked sense of humor lacing her books. ![]() She left behind her assorted juvenilia, an unfinished manuscript fragment, and six of the greatest novels in the English language - along with teasingly little information on how she thought about and saw the world. On July 18, 1817, Jane Austen died of an unknown illness in Winchester, England. ![]()
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