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
Jane Austen in popular culture in Japan, warned his Japanese students in his lectures that they would not like Austen, as the sort of violence which was normal in samurai stories was completely absent in Austen's novels. The first Japanese critic to draw attention to Austen was the influential writer Natsume Sōseki who in his 1907 book "A Theory of Literature" wrote that: “Anyone who is unable to appreciate Austen will be unable to understand the beauty of realism.” Sōseki, who was fluent in English, lived in London from 1900 to 1903, where he first discovered Austen, who he regarded as having achieved his ideal