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 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,