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 1870 that there was a distinctive American response to Austen. As Southam explains, "for American literary nationalists Jane Austen's cultivated scene was too pallid, too constrained, too refined, too downright unheroic". Austen was not democratic enough for American tastes and her canvas did not extend to the frontier themes that had come to define American literature. By the start of the 20th century, the American response was represented by the debate between the American novelist and critic William Dean Howells and the writer and humourist Mark Twain. In a series of essays, Howells helped make Austen into a canonical figure