For years, people thought the same of Austen as Scott and Whately. Only a few people actually read her novels. In 1870 the first important Austen biography, "A Memoir of Jane Austen", was written by Jane Austen's nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh and printed. This changed the way people thought of Austen. When it came out in print, Austen's popularity and critical standing increased greatly. The "Memoir" made people think of an untrained writer who wrote . People thought Austen was a quiet, middle-aged unmarried aunt. This made them feel that her works were safe for respectable Victorian families to read. The "Memoir" made Austen's books be printed again in great numbers. The first popular editions came out in 1883. They were a cheap series printed by Routledge. This was followed by editions with pictures, collectors' sets, and scholarly editions. However, critics still said that only people who could really understand the deep meaning of Austen's books should read them. However, after the "Memoir" was printed, much more criticism about Austen was printed. More came out in two years than had come out in the last 50 years.
In 1913, William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh printed a family biography. It was titled: "Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters—A Family Record". William and Arthur were both part of the Austen family. It was based mostly on family papers and letters. It is described by Austen biographer Park Honan as ", staid (steady), , and at times vivid and suggestive". The authors moved away from the sentimental tone of the "Memoir". However, they did not go much beyond the family records and traditions they always had. Therefore, their book offers only facts. It does not offer much interpretation.
In the last part of the nineteenth century, the first critical books about Austen's works were printed. In 1890 Godwin Smith printed the "Life of Jane Austen". This began a "fresh phase in the critical ". This began "formal (official) criticism". People began focusing on Austen as a writer and analyzing the ways that made her writing special. Southam said that there was much more Austen criticism around 1780. He also said that the reviews became better. However, he was troubled at the "certain uniformity" in them:
We see the novels praised for their elegance of form and their surface 'finish'; for the realism of their fictional world, the variety and vitality (strength) of their characters; for their pervasive humour; and for their gentle and undogmatic morality and its unsermonising delivery. The novels are prized for their 'perfection'. Yet it is seen to be a narrow perfection, achieved within the bounds of domestic comedy.
Richard Simpson, Margaret Oliphant, and Leslie Stephen were some of the best reviewers. In a review of the "Memoir", Simpson said Austen was a serious but ironic critic of English society. He began two interpretative themes: using humor to criticize society and irony as a means of moral study. He continued Lewes's comparison to Shakespeare, and wrote that Austen:
began by being an ironical critic; she manifested her by direct censure, but by the indirect method of imitating and exaggerating the faults of her , humour, irony, the judgment not of one that gives sentence but of the mimic who quizzes while he mocks, are her characteristics.
Simpson's essay was not well-known. It did not a lot of influence until Lionel Trilling quoted it in 1957. Margaret Oliphant was another important writer whose criticism of Austen did not have much influence. She described Austen as "armed with a 'fine vein of feminine cynicism,' 'full of subtle power, keenness, finesse, and self-restraint (control),' with an 'exquisite sense' of the 'ridiculous,' 'a fine stinging yet soft-voiced contempt,' whose works are very 'calm and cold and keen'". This kind of criticism was not fully developed until the 1970s. This was when feminist literary criticism began.
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 , 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."
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.
American novelist Henry James liked Austen. Once he said she was as great as Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Henry Fielding - "the fine painters of life". But James thought Austen was an "unconscious" artist who was "instinctive and charming". In 1905, James said he did not like the public interest in Austen. He said it was more than Austen's "intrinsic merit (worth) and interest" deserved. James said that this was mostly because of the "stiff breeze of the special bookselling body of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of the pleasant twaddle of magazines; who have found their 'dear,' our dear, everybody's dear, their material pretty reproduction in every variety of what is called tasteful, and in what seemingly proves to be salable, form."
Reginald Farrer, a British travel writer, did not like the sentimental image of "Aunt Jane". Instead, he wanted to study Austen's fiction in a new way. In 1917, he published a long essay in the "Quarterly Review". Jane Austen scholar A. Walton Litz called it the best single introduction to her works. Southam calls it as a "Janeite" piece without the worship. Farrer claimed that Jane Austen was not unconscious (disagreeing with James). He said that she was a writer of great concentration and a sharp critic of her society. He called her "radiant and remorseless", "dispassionate yet pitiless", with "the steely quality, the incurable rigor of her judgment". Farrer was one of the first critics who saw Austen as a writer.