Reception history of Jane Austen
Famous writer Walter Scott wrote the longest and deepest of these reviews. He was asked by publisher John Murray to review Emma. Emma had come out in print (without saying who the writer was) in the March 1816 issue of the Quarterly Review. Using the review as a way to praise the novel, Scott praised Austen's works. He praised her ability to copy "from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the  correct and striking representation of that which is daily (every day) taking place around him". Modern Austen scholar William Galperin has noted that "unlike some of Austen's lay readers, who recognized her divergence (difference) from realistic practice as it had been prescribed and defined at the time, Walter Scott may well have been the first to install Austen as the realist par excellence". Scott wrote in his private journal in 1826 about Austen. This later became a widely quoted comparison: