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 Jane Austen Book Club The Jane Austen Book Club The Jane Austen Book Club is a 2004 novel by American author Karen Joy Fowler. The story, which takes place near Sacramento, California, centers on a book club consisting of five women and one man who meet once a month to discuss Jane Austen's six novels. It was a critical success and became a national bestseller. A film adaptation of the same name was released in autumn of 2007. The novel takes place over the course of several months in Davis, California, a university town in California's Central Valley near Sacramento. Each of the six