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 Christian position in these controversies. In a similar vein, Alistair M. Duckworth in "The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels" (1971) argues that Austen used the concept of the "estate" to symbolise all that was important about contemporary English society, which should be conserved, improved, and passed down to future generations. Duckworth argued that Austen followed Edmund Burke, who in his 1790 book "Reflections on the Revolution in France" had used the metaphor of an estate that represented the work of generations, and which could be only be improved, never altered, for the way that society