Reception history of Jane Austen
The Encyclopædia Britannica's changed the way they described Austen as she became more and more popular. The eighth edition (1854) called her "an elegant novelist". The ninth edition (1875) praised her as "one of the most distinguished (remarkable) modern British novelists". Austen novels began to be studied at universities. Her works also began to come out in histories of the English novel. Most people still thought of her as "dear aunt Jane", the way she was first presented in the Memoir. Howells had made this picture of Austen famous by his essays in the Harper's Magazine. Writer and critic Leslie Stephen described a mania for Austen that grew in the 1880s as "Austenolatry". It was only after the Memoir was printed that readers grew to like Austen as a person. Until then, literary elites had said their enjoyment of Austen showed how clever they were. However, around the 1990s, they grew troubled at how popular Austen's works became. They began calling themselves Janeites. They wanted to show that they were different from the people who they thought did not understand Austen properly.