Reception history of Jane Austen
Mid-century revisionist views started to become popular, and scholars began studying Austen more sceptically. D. W. Harding, adding to Farrer, wrote an essay called "Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen". He argued that Austen did not support society's customs, and that her irony was not funny but bitter. He also claimed that Austen wanted to show the faults of the society she wrote about. Through her use of irony, Austen tried to protect herself as an artist and a person from the behavior and practices she disliked. Almost at the same time, British critic Q. D. Leavis printed "Critical Theory of Jane Austen's Writing" in Scrutiny in the early 1940s. In there, Leavis argued that Austen was a professional, not an amateur (untrained), writer. Harding's and Leavis's articles were followed by Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (1952). This was written by Martin Mudrick, who saw Austen as lonely, defensive, and critical of her society. He carefully described the connection between Austen's attitude towards the literature of her time and how she used irony to show the difference of how society was, and how she thought it could be. An important British critic, F. R. Leavis, said in The Great Tradition (1948) that Austen was one of the great writers of English fiction. Ian Watt agreed, and helped shape the arguments about the genre of the novel. The revisionist views and Leavis's words helped Austen to have a great reputation among academics. They agreed that she "combined (put together) [Henry Fielding's and Samuel Richardson's] qualities of interiority and irony, realism and satire to form an author superior to (better than) both".