Reception history of Jane Austen
Austen's books quickly became fashionable. Aristocrats who liked to set the fashion and taste of the day especially liked them. Henrietta Ponsonby, Countess of Bessborough wrote about Sense and Sensibility in a letter to a friend. She said: "it is a clever novel.  ... tho' it ends stupidly, I was much amused by it." The 15-year-old daughter of the Prince Regent, Princess Charlotte Augusta, compared herself to Marianne Dashwood. She remarked, "I think Marianne & me are very like in disposition, that certainly I am not so good, the same , &tc". Pride and Prejudice was enjoyed by Richard Sheridan, a person who wrote plays. He told a friend to "[b]uy it immediately" for it "was one of the cleverest things" he had ever read. Anne Milbanke, future wife of Lord Byron, wrote that "I have finished the Novel called Pride and Prejudice, which I think a very superior (good) work." She added that "is the most probable fiction I have ever read" and had become "at present the fashionable novel". The Dowager Lady Vernon told a friend that Mansfield Park was "[n]ot much of a novel, more the history of a family party in the country, very natural". Lady Anne Romilly told her friend, the writer Maria Edgeworth, that "[Mansfield Park] has been pretty generally admired here". Edgeworth later said that "we have been much entertained with Mansfield Park".