Reception history of Jane Austen their class, instead of their moral failures being presented as a product of the social system. Writing about the work of Johnson, Irvine wrote that for her, Austen was a radical because it is women like Emma Woodhouse, Mrs. Elton and Mrs. Churchill who really run Highbury society, undercutting traditional gender roles, but Irvine questioned whether this really made Austen into radical, noting it was the wealth and status of the gentry women of Highbury that gave them their power. Irvine argued it was just as possible to see "Emma" as a conservative novel that upholds the superiority of the
Reception history of Jane Austen used realism as a way of attacking patriarchy from the outside as opposed to subverting it from within by irony as Gilbert and Gubar claimed. The interest generated in Austen by these critics led to the discovery and study of other woman writers of the time. Moreover, with the publication of Julia Prewitt Brown's "Jane Austen's Novels: Social Change and Literary Form" (1979), Margaret Kirkham's "Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction" (1983), and Claudia L. Johnson's "Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel" (1988), scholars were no longer able to easily argue that Austen was "apolitical, or even unqualifiedly 'conservative'". Kirkham,