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 in popular culture West-End style musical theatre production based on the life of Jane Austen. The musical, directed by Geetika Lizardi, focuses on Austen as a modern heroine, a woman who chose art and integrity over the security of a loveless marriage. Jane Austen features as an amateur sleuth in Stephanie Barron's Jane Austen series of historical mystery novels. Kate Beaton, cartoonist of webcomic "Hark! A Vagrant", devoted one of her comic strips to Jane Austen. Jane Austen (voiced by Eden Riegel) is revealed as the narrator of 2013's "Saints Row IV" in a bonus cutscene, and the game's antagonist Zinyak reads the