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 for example, described the similarities between Austen's thought and that of Mary Wollstonecraft, labelling them both as "Enlightenment feminists". Kirham argued that by showing that women were just as capable of being rational as men, that Austen was a follower of Wollstonecraft. Johnson similarly places Austen in an 18th-century political tradition, although she outlines the debt Austen owes to the political novels of the 1790s written by women. The war with France that began in 1793 was seen as an ideological war between the British monarchy vs. the French republic, which led conservative writers such as Jane West, Hannah More,