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 being the scribe who produced these books that they admired so much. More typical of the post-1945 scholarship is Marvin Mudrick's 1952 book "Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery", where he argued that Austen used irony as a way of deflating conventions and to gently challenge the reader's beliefs. In 1951, Arnold Kettle in his "Introduction to the English Novel" praised Austen for her "fineness of feeling", but complained about the "relevance" of her work to the 20th century, charging that the values of Austen's novels were too much those of Regency England to be acceptable for the 20th