Some 30 years ago, in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Marilyn Butler placed Austen within the ideological disputes of her day and discovered a novelist who was a conservative and a Christian, sharply opposed to the liberal and “Jacobin” novels of her youth.

If you want to read an AMAZING book on Jane’s works, check out John Mullan’s What Matters in Jane Austen? 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. Jane's younger family members grew up in the Victorian Age and tweaked Jane's image to fit the ideal of a pious, quiet, unassuming, Christian woman. However, she totally disregards his next words – ‘A pint of porter with my cold beef at Marlborough was enough to over-set me’(4) – indicating that he was being sarcastic and most definitely in his right mind and not drunk. 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.The great chapters contained a unifying theory that brought together the historical context and the actual plot and actions of the characters: Northanger Abbey (where the childbirth stuff is contained, as well as some fascinating stuff about gothic novels), Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice were the standouts, followed pretty closely by the chapter on Persuasion. According to Debrett’s, there were about 90 English earldoms alone at the start of the Regency – a very large handful! It might help you to understand some of the influences that affected Jane’s writings which might lead to a greater enjoyment of her work, but it is also possible that you might not like everything you discover. Each of these chapters begins with a fictional section based on one of Jane’s letters which helped set the theme for the chapter.

I learned a lot, I saw Austen with fresh eyes, and that’s a lot for me to say after a lifetime of immersion. Sense and Sensibility was I think the strongest of her chapters, as it had the most textual revelations, and drew the most surprise from me. It felt like she was working too hard to make Jane Austen's works fit the "secret radical" image, choosing the most cynical, negative interpretations possible. Her justification (Austen’s assertion that it is in fiction that one will find “the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties”) was convincing, but I found the approach grating.

Kelly tells us of carpenters imprisoned for reciting doggerel and schoolmasters imprisoned for distributing leaflets. Habeas corpus was suspended; the meaning of treason was expanded to include “thinking, writing, printing, reading”. Another of Jane's sisters-in-law collapsed and died suddenly at the age of thirty-six; it sounds very much as if the cause might have been the rupturing of an ectopic pregnancy, which was, then, impossible to treat.

That in “Northanger Abbey” Austen describes Catherine Morland masturbating (“Let’s not mince words here”) requires an elasticity of imagination beyond the breaking point for the pusillanimous. 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.There's really no need to panic if it turns out that Austen might have been a conservative and a snob and a product of her social environment and class. At the very least, she found the verities of class structure and institutional religion problematic and often mockworthy. In Northanger Abbey, published after Austen's death and years too late for the audience it was intended for--readers who were well versed in the Gothic novel of the 1790s--Kelly sees "The Anxieties of Common Life.

The background is a stately home “where Jane didn’t live” and the selected quotation – “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! The colonialist aspects of Mansfield Park, for example, have been extensively explored in the twenty-odd years since Said wrote his seminal essay. Marriage as Jane knew it involved a woman giving up everything to her husband—her money, her body, her very existence as a legal adult. Kelly illuminates the radical subjects--slavery, poverty, feminism, the Church, evolution, among them--considered treasonous at the time, that Austen deftly explored in the six novels that have come to embody an age. In Pride and Prejudice, that sparkling and delightful novel so beloved today, Kelly finds a "revolutionary fairy tale, a fantasy of how, with reform, with radical thinking, society can be safely remodeled" without the revolution that had wracked France.

The whole book is stuffed full of things like that that completely reset the way you interpret the smallest of things. Austen was unique as a novelist of this period in writing “novels which were set more or less in the present day, and more or less in the real world”.