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 Season films were first aired in the United States on WGBH-TV as part of the PBS Masterpiece series, "The Complete Jane Austen". The Jane Austen Season The Jane Austen Season is a British television series of dramas based on novels by Jane Austen. The season began on ITV at 9:00 p.m. on Sunday 18 March 2007, with "Mansfield Park". The following week, "Northanger Abbey" was aired. The season ended with the airing of "Persuasion" on Sunday 1 April 2007. A repeat of the 1996 feature-length film "Emma" was broadcast on Friday 6 April 2007. The combined ITV and BBC series was