Reception history of Jane Austen Critic" felt that Austen's exclusive dependence on realism was evidence of a deficient imagination. The reviewer for the "Edinburgh Review" disagreed, praising Austen for her "exhaustless invention" and the combination of the familiar and the surprising in her plots. Overall, Austen scholars have pointed out that these early reviewers did not know what to make of her novels—for example, they misunderstood her use of irony. Reviewers reduced "Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice" to didactic tales of virtue prevailing over vice. In the "Quarterly Review" in 1821, the English writer and theologian Richard Whately published the most serious and
Jane Austen Notice" her brother wrote in 1818; and family details continued to be or embellished in her nephew's "A Memoir of Jane Austen", published in 1869, and in William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh's biography "Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters", published in 1913. The legend the family and relatives created reflects their biases in favour of "good quiet Aunt Jane", portraying a woman whose domestic situation was happy and whose family was the mainstay of her life. Austen scholar Jan Fergus explains that modern biographies tend to include details excised from the letters and family biographical materials, but that the challenge