LAUSR

The bicentennial of Jane Austen’s death, 2017 was a banner year for scholarly writing about and popular interest in the novelist’s life and work. Even the Bank of England commemorated the occasion, issuing its new £10 banknote featuring Austen’s likeness. Helena Kelly’s Jane Austen: The Secret Radical and Devoney Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen both aim to appeal to the vast Austen fandom as well as to literary scholars. As Looser points out in her monograph, some readers and writers—including her—happily identify with both groups. Looser and Kelly excavate histories and contexts for Austen’s work that in some cases upend critical orthodoxies. That said, the foci of these two studies are diametrically opposed. In specific ways, Kelly seeks to resituate Austen’s work in events and debates familiar to “the audience it was intended for” (292). For Looser, by contrast, understanding the significance of Austen’s work requires that we attend “without the usual condescension” to how her work has been appropriated by generations of readers, publishers, illustrators, playwrights, educators, and (of course) filmmakers (84). Jane Austen: The Secret Radical begins by asserting that