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 History of England (Austen) The History of England (Austen) The History of England is a 1791 work by Jane Austen, written when the author was fifteen. The work is a burlesque which pokes fun at widely used schoolroom history books such as Oliver Goldsmith's 1771 "The History of England from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II". Austen mockingly imitates the style of textbook histories of English monarchs, while ridiculing historians' pretensions to objectivity. It was illustrated with coloured portraits by Austen's elder sister Cassandra, to whom the work is dedicated. The second page of the "History" reads: Her "History" cites as