Politics of Jane Austen

Jane Austen is one of the great formative influences on thinking about 'England' and 'Englishness', about class, ideology and gender issues. But this book shows how the critical convoy for 'Jane' has aligned her with conservative views which her texts entertain - but don't avow. Indeed attempts to conscript her work for a rather crusty, Tory view of life ironically deflect attention from what, ultimately, she is to be valued for. Although there is an 'Austen industry' and a fairly settled consensus on what she signifies, Edward Neill shows that this is largely illusion, and that much traditional criticism has been fundamentally misdirected. Also unhelpful here, as Neill demonstrates, are biographies, which provide you, at most, with a wraith, or a wreath, and 'Heritage' adaptations for large and small screen which offer spectacular presentations of the gilded, vampiric ancien regimes. This book thus seeks to 'liberate' the reading of Jane Austen, but with a very different critical inflection from those of traditional appropriations. Austen's greatness is not that of the politically correct, but her exquisite works of art are at all times, and quite correctly, political.