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
Rachel Hunter (author) Jane herself composed a mock fan-letter to "Mrs Hunter of Norwich...Miss Jane Austen's tears have flowed over each sweet sketch in such a way as would do Mrs Hunter's heart good to see". Rachel Hunter (author) Rachel Hunter (ca. 1754 – 1813) was an English novelist of the early 19th century, who lived and worked in Norwich. Rachel Hunter wrote for the same circulating library readership as Jane Austen, and like the latter she might belittle standard novel conventions in writings like "Letitia". Her writings were well known in the Austen circle, one acquaintance describing a state of well-being as