The Core Blog

(It is a felicity that the elision in the title allows one to pronounce it as ‘Whatever persuasion’, so that it suggests at once something peculiar about Austen but also about ourselves, making it then something not peculiar but universal, acknowledged or not).Dr. Looser (LOE-sir) at the TLS has very likely bemused some readers in her latest article by turning into adverbs words that really must be left as adjectives: ‘conjecturally’, ‘conjugally’, ‘unblinkingly’, ‘glancingly’. It is a nice surprise, but one that we don’t understand. The effect is to have the reader come away with the sense of having read something cringingly. Her purpose was to review two of the latest on Jane Austen. One is a new edition of Mansfield Park, edited by Deidre Shauna Lynch; another is Jane Austen, The Secret Radical, by Helena Kelly, who tries to radically politicize Austen by rediscovering her as a radical.

Bath Gin, made by the Bath Gin Company The Bath Gin Company. Image for The Times Literary Supplement

The boundaries between fact and fiction in Austen-inspired books are strikingly porous. Of the two books under review here, the ostensible work of literary criticism, Helena Kellys Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, more often resembles a novel, offering readers a copious amount of what Kelly herself dubs truthful fictions. By contrast, the edition of Austens novel, Lynchs annotated Mansfield Park, has been amplified into a significant work of criticism, mostly contained in its jumbo side margins. To make this turnabout even more strange, it is Kellys novelish critical work that employs the bombastic rhetoric of right and wrong, while Lynchs edition gives us, within its helpful concatenation of facts, a more reasonable number of mights and perhapses.

The object of this review was good until Dr. Looser began to compare the two while seeming to be unaware that Lynch was performing the task of an editor and Kelly that of a literary critic. Both editor and critic must imaginatively analyze a text, but differ in the scope and liberty with which they may go about doing so. Dr. Looser does explore some questions worth pondering about the blurring of fact and fiction in Jane Austen.

Read her full review at The TLS