Jane Austen and he was dependent on a great-uncle in Ireland to finance his education and establish his legal career. If Tom Lefroy later visited Hampshire, he was carefully kept away from the Austens, and Jane Austen never saw him again. In November 1798, Lefroy was still on Austen's mind as she wrote to her sister she had tea with one of his relatives, wanted desperately to ask about him, but could not bring herself to raise the subject. After finishing "Lady Susan", Austen began her first full-length novel "Elinor and Marianne". Her sister remembered that it was read to the family
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