Reception history of Jane Austen
In the 1970s and 1980s, Austen studies was influenced by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). The Madwoman in the Attic explores the "explosive anger" of nineteenth-century female English writers under their "decorous (proper) surfaces". This work, together with other feminist criticism of Austen, has made people see her as a woman writer. The interest these critics showed in Austen made people discover and study other women writers in Austen's time. Also, when Julia Prewitt Brown's Jane Austen's Novels: Social Change and Literary Form (1979), Margaret Kirkham's Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction (1983), and Claudia L. Johnson's Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (1988) were printed, scholars were no longer able to argue that Austen was firmly "apolitical, or '". Kirkham, for example, said that Austen's thought and that of Mary Wollstonecraft were quite similar. She called them both "Enlightenment feminists". Johnson also places Austen in an eighteenth-century political tradition. However, she notes the influence Austen received from the political novels of the 1790s written by women.