A very careful reader in Austen’s own day might have picked up on many of the hints Kelly highlights, but it’s pretty astonishing that a twenty-first-century reader could do so. I laugh out loud when I read Austen because I hear the words of an angry women lashing back at the stuffy society in which she existed. But surely it was not Exeter where Edward was educated but at Longstaple near Plymouth at the house of Lucy Steele’s uncle, Mr Pratt?

There are many more comments I could make on this book which, in my opinion, was a mixed bag of fascinating insights and unhelpful suggestions that I could have done without. Kelly argues in lucid terms for a thinking, challenging, contrarian-minded Jane Austen who has a tremendous gift for subtlety and who makes her points through deceptively cozy, everyday stories. Having warned the reader about how little is known about Jane and her intentions, she then spends the remainder of the book second-guessing authorial intent and inserting fictionalised scenes of Jane's life that might have prompted her novels. Anyway, the way to read literary criticism like this isn't to ascribe wholly to whatever the author's interpretations are.Few are likely to be convinced that Austen depicts Mr Knightley as a ruthless encloser of common land, “blind” to and “inconsiderate” of the concerns of poorer villagers. There is other stuff that grates me as well: many of the specific points she makes (especially those concerning Mansfield Park) have been well established in the Austen community for years, yet she acts as though she is the first person to think of them, and doesn't cite the other Austen critics who originally came up with them. Listening to the excellent Bonnets at Dawn podcast about Mansfield Park inspired me to download this book and read it at last. I learned a lot, I saw Austen with fresh eyes, and that’s a lot for me to say after a lifetime of immersion.

Her novels don’t confine themselves to grand houses and they were not written just for readers’ enjoyment. Books do not need to be written to point out that we don't always appreciate everything that there is to appreciate. However, a lot of the conclusions the book is presenting as groundbreaking revelations are simply too far-fetched to be in any way believable.Threats from abroad (wars with France and America; the French Revolution) made for a country on alert for threats from within, where “any criticism of the status quo was seen as disloyal and dangerous”. The author reveals just how in the novels we find the real Jane Austen: a clever, clear-sighted woman “of information,” fully aware of what was going on in the world and sure about what she thought of it. The chapter about Emma was all right, but the subject of enclosure just isn't as interesting to me as it seems to have been to Kelly. She painted a condensed story of Austen's life, while using each of Austen's main books to argue a different way Austen was unlike the modern viewer's conception of her. The Age of Brass" finds Kelly's reading of Sense and Sensibility as a book about "property and inheritance--about greed and the terrible, selfish things that families do to each other for the sake of money.

One might think it is a matter of seeing what one wants to see in a book, but I will warn you that Kelly builds her case based on the texts and family letters and a thorough knowledge of Austen's life, time, and place.Despite reading all of Austen's works, many of them several times, I'd never considered Austen through any of the lenses Kelly presented. Through a combination of beautifully precise close readings alongside Austen’s biographical, literary and historical context, Kelly shows us that the novels were about nothing more or less than the burning political questions of the day.