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
A Memoir of Jane Austen status, centred in home, writing only in the intervals permitted from the important domestic duties of a devoted daughter, sister, and aunt". However, the manuscripts published alongside the biography suggest another portrait, one of a struggling author who endlessly revised and of a "restless and sardonic spirit". The book had an "immediate" and "incalculable" effect on the public's perception of Jane Austen. It generated interest in the works of an author which, for half a century, had been read almost entirely by the literary elite, and Austen's popularity increased dramatically. The publication of the "Memoir" also spurred the reissue of