Edward Neill 1999: the Politics of Jane Austen‪.‬

Edward Neill 1999: The Politics of Jane Austen. Basingstoke: Macmillan. xiv + 175 pp. ISBN 0 333 74719 4. The Politics of Jane Austen is an ambitious book: it announces clearly its intention to be user-friendly and aims to discuss Austen in the light of critical theory. The success of this enterprise will obviously depend on how well- equipped the reader is: some may find Neill's work lives up to its claims, others may think it fails to do so. As befits a book with such an explicit title, Neill makes no secret of his own political stance: his discussion of the politics of Jane Austen aims to liberate the six major novels from the strait-jacket imposed on them by critics from both the right and the left who have read them as variations on a mise-en-scene of the Tory world-view. Neill takes issue with those who have recently "closed" the works of Jane Austen and "riveted them to its signified". He particularly sets out to dismantle appropriations of Jane Austen and her works for conservative ideological positions.