Jane Austen "before 1796" and was told through a series of letters. Without surviving original manuscripts, there is no way to know how much of the original draft survived in the novel published anonymously in 1811 as "Sense and Sensibility". Austen began a second novel, "First Impressions" (later published as "Pride and Prejudice"), in 1796. She completed the initial draft in August 1797, aged 21; as with all of her novels, Austen read the work aloud to her family as she was working on it and it became an "established favourite". At this time, her father made the first attempt to publish
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