Famous writer Walter Scott wrote the longest and deepest of these reviews. He was asked by publisher John Murray to review "Emma". "Emma" had come out in print (without saying who the writer was) in the March 1816 issue of the "Quarterly Review". Using the review as a way to praise the novel, Scott praised Austen's works. He praised her ability to copy "from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the correct and striking of that which is daily (every day) taking place around him". Modern Austen scholar William Galperin has noted that "unlike some of Austen's lay readers, who recognized her divergence (difference) from realistic practice as it had been prescribed and defined at the time, Walter Scott may well have been the first to install Austen as the realist par excellence". Scott wrote in his private journal in 1826 about Austen. This later became a widely quoted comparison:
Also read again and for the third time at least Miss Austen's very finely written novel of "Pride and Prejudice". That young lady had a talent for describing the and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders (makes) ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!
"Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion" were published together in December 1817. They were reviewed in the "British Critic" in March 1818 and in the "Edinburgh Review and Literary Miscellany" in May 1818. The reviewer for the "British Critic" felt that Austen's great use of realism was proof of a limited imagination. The reviewer for the "Edinburgh Review" thought differently. He praised Austen for her " invention". He was also pleased with Austen's stories because they mixed familiar scenes with surprising twists. Austen scholars have pointed out that these early reviewers did not know what to make of her works. For example, they wrongly understood her use of irony. Reviewers thought "Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice" were stories of virtue overcoming vice.
In the "Quarterly Review" in 1821 another review came out. Richard Whately was an English writer and theologican. He published the most serious early review of Austen's work. Whately compared Austen and great writers such as Homer and Shakespeare with favor. He praised the dramatic quality of her stories. He also said that the novel was a real, respectable genre of literature. He argued that imaginative literature, especially , was very valuable. He even said they were more important than history or biography. When it was well done, as Austen's works were, Whately said that novels wrote about human experience that the reader could learn from. In other words, he believed that it was moral. Whately also addressed Austen's position as a female writer. He wrote: "we suspect one of Miss Austin's ["sic"] great merits in our eyes to be, the insight she gives us into the peculiarities of female heroines are what one knows women must be, though one never can get them to acknowledge (admit) it." No better criticism of Austen was put in print until the late nineteenth century. Whately and Scott had begun the Victorian era's view of Austen.
Austen had a great number of readers who liked and respected her in the nineteenth century. According to critic Ian Watt, they liked her " to ordinary (usual) social experience". However, Austen's works were not exactly what her Romantic and Victorian British audience liked. They wished for "powerful emotion [be] authenticated by an egregious display of sound and color in the writing". Victorian critics and audiences liked the work of writers like Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Compared to them, Austen's works seemed narrow and quiet. Austen's works were put in print again beginning in late 1832 or early 1833. Richard Bentley printed them in the "Standard Novels" series, and remained in print for a long time after that. However, they were not bestsellers. Southam describes her "reading public between 1821 and 1870" as "minute beside the known audience for Dickens and his contemporaries".
The people who read Austen saw themselves as clever readers. They were the few. This became a well-known theme of Austen criticism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. George Henry Lewes was a philosopher and literary critic. He spoke about this theme in a series of articles in the 1840s and 1850s. "The Novels of Jane Austen" was put in print in "Blackwood's Magazine" in 1859. In there, Lewes praised Austen's books for "the economy of easy adaptation of means to ends, with no aid (help) from superfluous elements". He also compared her to Shakespeare. He argued that Austen was not good at making up plots. However, he still enjoyed the dramatic quality of her works. He said: "The reader's pulse never throbs, his curiosity is never intense (very strong); but his interest never wanes (stops) for a moment. The action begins; the people speak, feel, and act; everything that is said, felt, or done tends towards the entanglement or disentanglement of the plot; and we are almost made actors as well as spectators (viewers) of the little drama."
Writer Charlotte Brontë liked Austen's writing because they were truthful about everyday life. However, Brontë called her "only shrewd (clever) and observant". She said there was not enough passion in her work. To Brontë, Austen's work seemed formal and narrow. In a letter written to G.H. Lewes in 1848, Brontë said that she did not like "Pride and Prejudice". She said:
Soon after Austen's works were printed in Britain, they appeared in some European countries. They began appearing in 1813 with a French translation of "Pride and Prejudice". It was quickly followed by German, Dutch, and Swedish editions. They were not always easy to get in Europe. Austen was not well known in Russia. The first Russian translation of an Austen novel did not appear until 1967. Austen’s works were translated into various European languages. However, Europeans did not see her works as part of the English novel tradition. This was partly because of the changes made by translators. They put in sentimentalism into Austen's works. They also failed to put in her humor and irony. Therefore, European readers more often thought of Walter Scott's style as the English novel.
The great changes made by her translators made the Continent receive Austen differently than in Britain. For example, the French writer Isabelle de Montolieu translated several of Austen's novels into the French sentimental novel. In Montolieu's "Pride and Prejudice", conversations (talks) between Elizabeth and Darcy were replaced by calm, proper ones. In Jane Austen's work, Elizabeth said that she has "always seen a great similarity in the turn of [their] minds" (her and Darcy's). She says this is because they are "unwilling to speak, unless [they] expect to say something that will amaze (surprise) the whole room". However, this becomes "Moi, je garde le silence, parce que je ne sais que dire, et vous, parce que vous aiguisez vos traits pour parler avec effet." ("Me, I keep silent, because I don't know what to say, and you, because you excite your features for effect when speaking.") Cossy and Saglia explained, "the equality of mind which Elizabeth takes for granted is denied (not given) and gender distinction introduced". Austen’s works were seen in France as part of a sentimental tradition. Because of this, people were more interested in the works of French realists like Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert. Austen was also treated as a romantic writer in Germany.