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 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