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 they should be. These revisionist views, together with prominent critic F. R. Leavis's pronouncement in "The Great Tradition" (1948) that Austen was one of the great writers of English fiction, a view shared by Ian Watt, who helped shape the scholarly debate regarding the genre of the novel, did much to cement Austen's reputation amongst academics. They agreed that she "combined <nowiki>[</nowiki>Henry Fielding's and Samuel Richardson's<nowiki>]</nowiki> qualities of interiority and irony, realism and satire to form an author superior to both". The period after the Second World War saw a flowering of scholarship on Austen as well as a diversity