Jane Austen During her time at Chawton, Jane Austen published four generally well-received novels. Through her brother Henry, the publisher Thomas Egerton agreed to publish "Sense and Sensibility", which, like all of Jane Austen's novels except "Pride and Prejudice", was published "on commission", that is, at the author's financial risk. When publishing on commission, publishers would advance the costs of publication, repay themselves as books were sold and then charge a 10% commission for each book sold, paying the rest to the author. If a novel did not recover its costs through sales, the author was responsible for them. The alternative to
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