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
Reception history of Jane Austen discourse allowed the reader to understand Emma mind without becoming limited by it. Another major theme of Austen scholarship has concerned the question of the "Bildungsroman" (novel of education). D.D Devlin in "Jane Austen and Education" (1975) argued that Austen's novels were all in varying ways "Bildungsroman", where Austen put into practice Enlightenment theories about how the character of young people can develop and change. The Italian literary critic Franco Moretti in his 1987 book "The Way of the World" called "Pride and Prejudice" a "classic" "Bildungsroman", where Elizabeth Bennet's "prejudice" against Mr. Darcy is really "distrust" and that "she