Georgian society in Jane Austen's novels as it started in 1760, just before her parents married in 1764, and ended up in 1820, after the death of Austen in 1817 and the posthumous publication of her two novels, "Persuasion" and "Northanger Abbey" in 1818. It is through her cousin Eliza de Feuillide, married to a French aristocrat, that Jane Austen first heard of the French Revolution and of its violence. Eliza stayed in England in 1786 and 1787, and made several trips between France and England from 1788 to 1792. In January 1791, Eliza was in Margate, and was hoping that her husband, who had just
Reception history of Jane Austen being the scribe who produced these books that they admired so much. More typical of the post-1945 scholarship is Marvin Mudrick's 1952 book "Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery", where he argued that Austen used irony as a way of deflating conventions and to gently challenge the reader's beliefs. In 1951, Arnold Kettle in his "Introduction to the English Novel" praised Austen for her "fineness of feeling", but complained about the "relevance" of her work to the 20th century, charging that the values of Austen's novels were too much those of Regency England to be acceptable for the 20th