Reception history of Jane Austen
In the Quarterly Review in 1821 another review came out. Richard Whately was an English writer and theologican. He published the most serious early review of Austen's work. Whately compared Austen and great writers such as Homer and Shakespeare with favor. He praised the dramatic quality of her stories. He also said that the novel was a real, respectable genre of literature. He argued that imaginative literature, especially narrative, was very valuable. He even said they were more important than history or biography. When it was well done, as Austen's works were, Whately said that novels wrote about human experience that the reader could learn from. In other words, he believed that it was moral. Whately also addressed Austen's position as a female writer. He wrote: "we suspect one of Miss Austin's [sic] great merits in our eyes to be, the insight she gives us into the peculiarities of female  heroines are what one knows women must be, though one never can get them to acknowledge (admit) it." No better criticism of Austen was put in print until the late nineteenth century. Whately and Scott had begun the Victorian era's view of Austen.