Helena Kelly
Autor/a de Jane Austen, the Secret Radical
Sobre l'autor
Crèdit de la imatge: Official Portrait from InkWell Management Agency.
Obres de Helena Kelly
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Gènere
- female
- Nacionalitat
- UK
- Educació
- Oxford University
King's College, London
Membres
Ressenyes
Potser també t'agrada
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 2
- Membres
- 258
- Popularitat
- #88,950
- Valoració
- 3.4
- Ressenyes
- 12
- ISBN
- 11
The title and cover of the book flag its apparent intent: “Life and Lies,” with LIES highlighted. Helena Kelly seems to come at this with an agenda to ferret out every inconsistency, contradiction, or lacuna in the evidence surrounding CD’s life, and then posit her own possible explanations for them. And almost always to CD’s detriment. She has delved into archival files, memoirs, and other documentation to try to assemble a factually supported chronology of his life: exactly where he lived during what dates, the composition of family and connections’ relationships, backing up the details of what he told his first biographer and faithful friend Forster decades later, matching others’ recollections, etc. All of which is a very useful endeavor. The bits and pieces and scraps are jiggered and lined up, and yes, indeed, there are gaps and mismatches. The trouble is what she makes of them.
It feels like Kelly is setting out to come up with possibilities chosen to stand out as iconoclastic and different from conventional wisdom whenever possible. If a point can be stretched, she will stretch it. The text is riddled with “might have,” “could have,” “possibly,” “can be imagined,” and “what if.” Whatever facts are available to her are plot points for her to string into stories of her own making. The childhood death of CD’s little sister Harriet is spun into a scenario of a disabled child that no one would talk about, in an era when as many as 30% of children in London died before they were five, and about whom CD’s daughter Katie said she had died of smallpox. What is the point of that? Kelly sets out to suggest that CD either actually never worked in the blacking warehouse at all, that a family connection who helped arrange it didn’t exist, or that if he did, he was hired as a teenage ad writer. And her use of CD’s fiction is cherry-picked: examples are selected to support or deny her theories depending on whether they make CD look bad. At one point, she uses the fact that CD named a character convicted of embezzling “John” to support her proposition that CD’s father John may have been involved in an embezzlement scheme himself… as though “John” wasn’t the second-most common men’s name in the UK in 1850.
I was done. If the first two sections were so rife with speculation, far-fetched theories, and suppositions (“we may be intended to read…Miss Pross as Jewish…” because she has red hair? Is Uriah Heep Jewish too then?), I’d had enough. Kelly may have provided fodder for a lot of alternative history, and marshaled some useful data and documentation, but the use she makes of them smacks of ego and a foregone agenda. Even as CD has provided me with countless hours of joy, admiration, and contentment, I am very aware of many of his failings. But this book started to feel like an exercise in an imaginative hatchet job based on too little.
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