Wentworth Woodhouse a claim that the property had been Jane Austen's inspiration for Pemberley in her novel "Pride and Prejudice". It was thought that there might have been a connection to the house because Austen uses the name Fitzwilliam in her novel, but following the Chancellor's Autumn Statement the Jane Austen Society dismissed the likelihood that Austen had had the house in mind, given the absence of any evidence that she had visited the estate. Austen does, however, name a character Frederick Wentworth in "Persuasion", and the eponymous heroine of "Emma" has the surname Woodhouse. The series from BBC titled "The Country
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