Jane Austen French aristocrat whose first husband the Comte de Feuillide had been guillotined, causing her to flee to Britain, where she married Henry Austen. The description of the execution of the Comte de Feuillide related by his widow left Austen with an intense horror of the French Revolution that lasted for the rest of her life. During the middle of 1798, after finishing revisions of "Elinor and Marianne", Austen began writing a third novel with the working title "Susan" – later "Northanger Abbey" – a satire on the popular Gothic novel. Austen completed her work about a year later. In early
Reception history of Jane Austen of Austen's works. Almost simultaneously, influential critic Q. D. Leavis argued in "Critical Theory of Jane Austen's Writing", published in "Scrutiny" in the early 1940s, that Austen was a professional, not an amateur, writer. Harding's and Leavis's articles were followed by another revisionist treatment by Marvin Mudrick in "Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery" (1952). Mudrick portrayed Austen as isolated, defensive, and critical of her society, and described in detail the relationship he saw between Austen's attitude toward contemporary literature and her use of irony as a technique to contrast the realities of her society with what she felt