Jane Austen and he was dependent on a great-uncle in Ireland to finance his education and establish his legal career. If Tom Lefroy later visited Hampshire, he was carefully kept away from the Austens, and Jane Austen never saw him again. In November 1798, Lefroy was still on Austen's mind as she wrote to her sister she had tea with one of his relatives, wanted desperately to ask about him, but could not bring herself to raise the subject. After finishing "Lady Susan", Austen began her first full-length novel "Elinor and Marianne". Her sister remembered that it was read to the family
Reception history of Jane Austen Austen saw themselves as discriminating readers—they were a cultured few. This became a common theme of Austen criticism during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes articulated this theme in a series of enthusiastic articles in the 1840s and 1850s. In "The Novels of Jane Austen", published anonymously in "Blackwood's Magazine" in 1859, Lewes praised Austen's novels for "the economy of easy adaptation of means to ends, with no aid from superfluous elements" and compared her to Shakespeare. Arguing that Austen lacked the ability to construct a plot, he still celebrated her dramatisations: "The