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 Austen novel. Austen was greatly annoyed by Clarke's often pompous literary advice, and the "Plan of A Novel" parodying Clarke was intended as her revenge for all of the unwanted letters she had received from the royal librarian. In mid-1815 Austen moved her work from Egerton to John Murray, a better known London publisher, who published "Emma" in December 1815 and a second edition of "Mansfield Park" in February 1816. "Emma" sold well but the new edition of "Mansfield Park" did poorly, and this failure offset most of the income from "Emma". These were the last of Austen's novels to