Reception history of Jane Austen
After the Second World War, people began studying Austen more deeply, and in different ways. A great number of people have studied Austen as a political writer. Critic Gary Kelly explains, "Some see her as a political 'conservative' because she seems to defend the established social order. Others see her as sympathetic to 'radical' politics that challenged the established order, especially in the form of  critics see Austen's novels , criticizing aspects of the social order but supporting stability and an open class hierarchy." In Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), perhaps the most important of these works, Marilyn Butler argues that Austen was greatly influenced by the principal moral and political arguments of her time, and that she had a partisan, firmly conservative and Christian position in these arguments. Alistair M. Duckworth in The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels (1971) argues that Austen used the concept of the "estate" to symbolise all that was important  society, which should be conserved (kept), improved, and passed down to future generations. As Rajeswari Rajan notes, "the idea of a political Austen is no longer seriously challenged". The questions scholars now study include: "the Revolution, war, nationalism, empire, class, 'improvement' [of the estate], the clergy, town versus (against) country, abolition, the professions, female emancipation; whether her politics were Tory, Whig, or radical; whether she was a conservative or a revolutionary, or occupied (kept) a reformist position between these extremes".