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 Will brought on a relapse ... but a weak Body must excuse weak Nerves". She continued to work in spite of her illness. Dissatisfied with the ending of "The Elliots", she rewrote the final two chapters, which she finished on 6 August 1816. In January 1817 Austen began "The Brothers" (titled "Sanditon" when published in 1925), and completed twelve chapters before stopping work in mid-March 1817, probably due to illness. Todd describes "Sanditon"'s heroine, Diana Parker, as an "energetic invalid". In the novel, Austen mocked hypochondriacs and though she describes the heroine as "bilious", five days after abandoning the novel