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 of polite "King's English" that was expected of the upper classes. In "Jane Austen and the Body: 'The Picture of Health"', (1992) John Wiltshire explored the preoccupation with illness and health of Austen's characters. Wiltshire addressed current theories of "the body as sexuality", and more broadly how culture is "inscribed" on the representation of the body. There has also been a return to considerations of aesthetics with D. A. Miller's "Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style" (2003), which connects artistic concerns with queer theory. Miller in his book began the "queer" reading of Austen, when he asked why Austen's