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
The Company of Women (Gordon novel) or fun. Rather, she dreams of the day she can become a great writer like Jane Austen. Felicitas develops as a composite of the older women. The Company of Women (Gordon novel) The Company of Women is a novel by American author Mary Gordon. First published in 1981, it is a coming-of-age story that details the sheltered upbringing of a well-educated Catholic girl named Felicitas, and how her values are challenged and altered by the turbulence of the 1960s protest movement. The book earned Gordon a second Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Father Cyprian is a Catholic priest whose parishioners include