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Jane austen secret radical5/9/2023 ![]() ![]() “We’re perfectly willing to accept that writers like Wordsworth were fully engaged with everything that was happening and to find the references in their work, even when they’re veiled or allusive,” she admonishes. It is this beast that Kelly tackles in a meticulously researched book that is, at its heart, a stern telling-off of us as readers. But another part of me was, like Kelly, frustrated by yet another representation of Austen that fed the beast that enables presumably intelligent people to describe Austen with a straight face as “the 19th-century version of Barbara Cartland”. And so when the bank produced this mocked-up note, part of me was delighted. ![]() Rather, it was the culmination of a hard-fought campaign that I started when the bank announced that the only female historical figure on our banknotes was being replaced with Winston Churchill. It was not, as Kelly asserts, a simple matter of the Bank of England celebrating the bicentenary of Austen’s death. I also have mixed feelings about this banknote. ![]() 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!” – is “spoken by a character who shortly afterwards yawns and throws her book aside”. The “idealised picture” chosen by the bank looks “far less grumpy” than the “unfinished sketch it’s based on”. J udging from her introduction to Jane Austen: The Secret Radical, it seems fair to say that Helena Kelly is not a fan of the forthcoming Jane Austen £10 note. ![]()
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