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
Becoming Jane Austen Becoming Jane Austen Becoming Jane Austen was researched and written by the Jane Austen scholar Jon Hunter Spence. It chronicles a demi-biographical version of Austen's early biography based on Spence's interpretation of the novel "Pride and Prejudice" as possibly being modeled on Austen's real life, although Austen herself does not make this claim for her novel. "Becoming Jane Austen" was first published in hardcover by Hambledon Continuum in 2003. It chronicles the early life of Jane Austen, the encounters and the developing relationship between Austen and Tom Lefroy, based on letters sent by Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra. The