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 "one of the most distinguished modern British novelists". Around the start of the 20th century, Austen novels began to be studied at universities and appear in histories of the English novel. The image of her that dominated the popular imagination was still that first presented in the "Memoir" and made famous by Howells in his series of essays in "Harper's Magazine", that of "dear aunt Jane". Author and critic Leslie Stephen described a mania that started to develop for Austen in the 1880s as "Austenolatry"—it was only after the publication of the "Memoir" that readers developed a personal connection with