![]() ![]() ![]() "In the first the whole school got typhus. "On paper it looks like she has a secure life but she is sent off to boarding school twice and she almost dies," says Dr Helena Kelly, author of Jane Austen: A Secret Radical. She published her six celebrated novels in the space of seven years and died at the age of only 41. Beyond their preoccupation with love and romance, there is a layer of steel and a celebration of resilience in her books that may well inspire us as we read them in these deeply uncertain and circumscribed times.Īusten's own life was a lesson in forbearance. However when you actually dig into the writing, you find Austen offers more unexpected consolations. ![]() (Indeed, it seems no coincidence that the TV mega-hit of the moment, Netflix's Bridgerton, is a romantic drama set in Austen's Regency period, albeit with a decidedly more cartoonish and sexually-explicit sensibility). But why should her novels be suited to this pandemic era? On one level, it might seem obvious: such is the image of them crystallised in the public imagination by many glossy TV and film adaptations, they would seem to offer the perfect romantic escapism. ![]()
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