Dr Helena Kelly

Dr Helena Kelly is the author of The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens (due out November 2023)
and Jane Austen the Secret Radical. She holds a doctorate in English Literature from the
University of Oxford, where she has also taught from time to time, and continues to publish
occasional scholarly articles. Her work combines a variety of methods ranging from close-
reading and archival research to psychogeography, offering new angles on authors and the
stories we tell about them.

While at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing she will work on her third book – a biography of
the novelist and life-writer who is to this day popularly known as ‘Mrs Gaskell’. Despite
Gaskell’s varied and at times strikingly modern oeuvre, she has acquired an entirely
erroneous reputation as both a ‘domestic’ writer and a prudish one. This project seeks to
show just how inadequate – and inaccurate – these readings are, repositioning Gaskell as an
innovative and influential player in the literary scene, concerned less with her husband and
domestic duties than with the series of remarkable women inspired her. Helena’s research is
supported by a grant from the Society of Authors.