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
The Whirlpool (Jane Urquhart novel) The Whirlpool (Jane Urquhart novel) The Whirlpool, originally published in Toronto by McClelland and Stewart in 1986, is Canadian author Jane Urquhart's first novel. It was subsequently published in the United Kingdom by Simon and Schuster, in the USA by David R. Godine, and in translation in France (under the title "Niagara") by Maurice Nadeau. It was the first Canadian novel to be awarded France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 1992, and was afterward published in several other European countries. The novel is set in Niagara Falls in the summer of 1889, and focuses on the lives of several