Reception history of Jane Austen
Austen's works had been in print in the United States from 1832. However, it was only after 1870 that Americans began seriously considering Austen's works. As Southam says, "for American literary nationalists Jane Austen's cultivated scene was too pallid, too constrained, too refined, too downright unheroic". Austen was not democratic enough for Americans. Also, her books did not have the frontier themes that often came out in American literature. The way Americans thought about Austen was represented in an argument between William Dean Howells and Mark Twain. Through his essays, Howells helped make Austen much more popular. Twain, however, used Austen to argue against the Anglophile tradition in America. In his book Following the Equator, Twain described the library on his ship: "Jane Austen's  absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it."