Henry Thomas Austen In 1793 he joined the Oxfordshire Militia, rising to captain before resigning in 1801. In 1804 he founded, with two associates, the bank of Austen, Maude and Tilson in Covent Garden, London. It went bankrupt in 1816. He entered the church that same year and was made curate of Chawton, Hampshire. In 1820 he was made Rector of Steventon. He arranged the publication of "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion" after Jane Austen's death in 1817. He is believed to have published the first biographical notice of her, which prefaces those novels. He revised and expanded that short memoir for the republication
Reception history of Jane Austen work which celebrates heterosexual love is so popular with gay men. Miller answered that it was because the narrator of the novels has no sexuality and has a "dazzling verbal style", which allows homosexuals to identity with the narrator who stands outside the world of heterosexuality and whose chief attribute is a sense of style. Critic Claudia Johnson defines "Janeitism" as "the self-consciously idolatrous enthusiasm for 'Jane' and every detail relative to her". Janeites not only read the novels of Austen; they also re-enact them, write plays based on them, and become experts on early 19th-century England and its customs.