page_title: Reception history of Jane Austen
section_title: 1930–2000: Modern scholarship
hierarchical_section_title: Reception history of Jane Austen / 1930–2000: Modern scholarship
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of Samuel Johnson commissioned for Henry Thrale's Streatham Park gallery
context_page_description: The reception history of Jane Austen shows how Austen's works, at first having modest fame, became wildly popular. Her books are both the subject of great study and the center of various fan culture. Jane Austen, the writer of such works as Pride and Prejudice and Emma, has become one of the most famous novelists in the English language.
  During her lifetime, Austen's books did not make her very famous. Like a great number of women writers at that time, she chose to publish her books secretly. Only among people in the aristocracy, her writing was an open secret. At the time they were published, Austen's works were thought fashionable by members of high society. However, they received only a few good reviews. By the mid-nineteenth century, her works were respected by people who were learned in literature. They thought that liking her works was a sign that they were clever. In 1870, her nephew published Memoir of Jane Austen. This showed her to a wider public as "dear, quiet aunt Jane". After this, her works were published again in popular editions. By the twentieth century, lots of groups had formed. Some praised her and some defended her from the "teeming masses".
context_section_description: The light of Austen scholarship was beginning to shine through several important early works. These works helped Austen become well accepted in the academy. The first was Oxford Shakespearean scholar Andrew Cecil Bradley's 1911 essay. This essay was "generally (largely) regarded (seen) as the starting-point for the serious academic approach to Jane Austen". Bradley pointed out Austen's ties to eighteenth-century critic and writer Samuel Johnson. He argued that she was a moralist as well as a humorist. According to Southam, this argument was "totally (completely) original". Bradley separated Austen's works into "early" and "late" novels. Scholars still separate Austen's works as Bradley did today. The second original early-twentieth-century critic of Austen was R. W. Chapman. His edition of Austen's works was the first scholarly edition of the works of any English novelist. The Chapman edition has been the basis for all editions of Austen's works after that.
  After Bradley and Chapman, Austen scholarship grew very quickly in the 1920s. British writer E. M. Forster pointed out Austen's works for his idea of the "round" character. It was with the 1939 publication of Mary Lascelles' Jane Austen and Her Art—"the first full-scale historical and scholarly study" of Austen—that the academic study of her works matured. Lascelles included a short essay about her, a study of the books Austen read and their influence on her writing, and a study of Austen's style and "narrative art". Lascelles felt that critics before her had all worked in a way "so small that the reader does not see how they have reached their conclusions until he has patiently found his own way to them". She wished to study all of Austen's works, style, and techniques together. Critics after Lascelles agreed that she studied them well. Lascelles was interested in Austen's connection to Samuel Johnson and her desire to discuss morality through fiction. In this she was much like Bradley before her. But around this time, some fans of Austen began to worry that her works were being enjoyed by only a few people. They were fearful that Austen was being criticized only by academics. This was an argument that continued to the beginning of the twenty-first century.
  Mid-century revisionist views started to become popular, and scholars began studying Austen more sceptically. D. W. Harding, adding to Farrer, wrote an essay called "Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen". He argued that Austen did not support society's customs, and that her irony was not funny but bitter. He also claimed that Austen wanted to show the faults of the society she wrote about. Through her use of irony, Austen tried to protect herself as an artist and a person from the behavior and practices she disliked. Almost at the same time, British critic Q. D. Leavis printed "Critical Theory of Jane Austen's Writing" in Scrutiny in the early 1940s. In there, Leavis argued that Austen was a professional, not an amateur (untrained), writer. Harding's and Leavis's articles were followed by Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (1952). This was written by Martin Mudrick, who saw Austen as lonely, defensive, and critical of her society. He carefully described the connection between Austen's attitude towards the literature of her time and how she used irony to show the difference of how society was, and how she thought it could be. An important British critic, F. R. Leavis, said in The Great Tradition (1948) that Austen was one of the great writers of English fiction. Ian Watt agreed, and helped shape the arguments about the genre of the novel. The revisionist views and Leavis's words helped Austen to have a great reputation among academics. They agreed that she "combined (put together) [Henry Fielding's and Samuel Richardson's] qualities of interiority and irony, realism and satire to form an author superior to (better than) both".
  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. Cri
caption: Modern scholars were interested in Austen's ties to important eighteenth-century people such as Samuel Johnson.
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