By the mid-19th century, her novels were admired by members of the literary elite who viewed their appreciation of her works as a mark of cultivation, but they were also being recommended in the popular education movement and on school reading lists as early as 1838.

[17] As Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert explain, Austen makes fun of "such novelistic clichés as love at first sight, the primacy of passion over all other emotions and/or duties, the chivalric exploits of the hero, the vulnerable sensitivity of the heroine, the lovers' proclaimed indifference to financial considerations, and the cruel crudity of parents".

[29] Moreover, as Brian Southam, who has edited the definitive volumes on Austen's reception, writes in his description of these reviewers, "their job was merely to provide brief notices, extended with quotations, for the benefit of women readers compiling their library lists and interested only in knowing whether they would like a book for its story, its characters and moral".

Using the review as a platform from which to defend the then disreputable genre of the novel, Scott praised Austen's works, celebrating her ability to copy "from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader ... a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him".

Reacting against Lewes's essays and his personal communications with her, novelist Charlotte Brontë admired Austen's fidelity to everyday life but described her as "only shrewd and observant" and criticised the absence of visible passion in her work.

[46] To Brontë, Austen's work appeared formal and constrained, "a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck".

[47]Austen's novels appeared in some European countries soon after their publication in Britain, beginning in 1813 with a French translation of Pride and Prejudice in the journal Bibliothèque Britannique, quickly followed by German, Danish, and Swedish editions.

[67] According to Southam, while Austen criticism increased in amount and, to some degree, in quality after 1870, "a certain uniformity" pervaded it: 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 of their characters; for their pervasive humour; and for their gentle and undogmatic morality and its unsermonising delivery.

Continuing Lewes's comparison to Shakespeare, Simpson wrote that Austen: began by being an ironical critic; she manifested her judgment ... not by direct censure, but by the indirect method of imitating and exaggerating the faults of her models.

My choice, naturally, was "Mansfield Park," for all the authorities seemed to agree that it was Jane's best... [It] was extraordinarily stiff and clumsy, and even in moments of high passion the people of the tale had at one another with set speeches, many of them so ornate as to be almost unintelligible.

[88] Farrer denied that Austen's artistry was unconscious (contradicting James) and described her as a writer of intense concentration and a severe critic of her society, "radiant and remorseless", "dispassionate yet pitiless", with "the steely quality, the incurable rigor of her judgment".

[118] Siskin noted in Henry Fielding's popular 1742 novel Joseph Andrews, that a young man working as humble servant, goes through much suffering, and is ultimately rewarded when it is discovered that he is really an aristocrat kidnapped by the Romany (gypsies) when he was a baby.

[119] By contrast, Siskin wrote that Elizabeth Bennet's paternity is not in question and there are not improbable strokes of luck which will make her rich; instead her struggle is to develop her character and conquer her "prejudice" against Darcy, marking the shift in British literature from an "external" to "internal" conflict.

[121] Critics are badly divided over the question of whether the marriages of Austen's heroines are meant to be a reward for their virtuous behavior as seen by Wayne Booth, or merely "Good Girl Being Taught a Lesson" stories as seen by Claudia Johnson.

[127] Butler argued that a novel like Sense and Sensibility, where Marianne Dashwood is unable to control her emotions, is part of the conservative anti-revolutionary literature that sought to glorify old fashioned values and politics.

The questions scholars now investigate involve: "the [French] Revolution, war, nationalism, empire, class, 'improvement' [of the estate], the clergy, town versus country, abolition, the professions, female emancipation; whether her politics were Tory, Whig, or radical; whether she was a conservative or a revolutionary, or occupied a reformist position between these extremes".

[136] [I]n all her novels Austen examines the female powerlessness that underlies monetary pressure to marry, the injustice of inheritance laws, the ignorance of women denied formal education, the psychological vulnerability of the heiress or widow, the exploited dependency of the spinster, the boredom of the lady provided with no vocation.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Austen studies was influenced by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's seminal The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), which contrasts the "decorous surfaces" with the "explosive anger" of 19th-century female English writers.

[143] The war with France that began in 1793 was seen as an ideological war between the British monarchy vs. the French republic, which led conservative writers such as Jane West, Hannah More, and Elizabeth Hamilton to depict the feminine private sphere in the family as the embodiment of British values under threat from France, and to write a series of polemical works demanding that young women defend their "modesty", as defined by conduct books, to give Britain the moral strength to prevail over the French.

[145] In support of her thesis, Johnson noted in Sense and Sensibility that the Dashwood sisters are victimized by their greedy half-brother John, showing the family as an area for competition instead of warmth and comfort; in Mansfield Park the lifestyle of the eminently respectable Bertram family is supported by a plantation in Antigua worked by slave labour; and Northanger Abbey where satirizing Gothic stories gives "a nightmare version of patriarchal oppression" as General Tilney, if not guilty of the specific crimes that Catherine Moreland imagines he has committed, is indeed a vicious man.

[146] Likewise, Johnson noted that Maria Rushworth's adultery in Mansfield Park is portrayed as merely salacious local gossip that does not presage a great victory for Napoleon while Marianne Dashwood does not die after being seduced by Willoughby, which undercuts the standard plot devices of the conservative writers.

[150] Likewise, Elizabeth may defy Lady Catherine de Bourgh who wants to keep her in place by marrying Mr. Darcy, who comes from old landed family, which Irvine used to argue that while Pride and Prejudice does have a strong heroine, the book does not criticise the structure of English society.

[160] The Italian critic Franco Moretti argued that Austen's novels articulated a new form of English nationalism via the marriage plot, noting most of the heroes and heroines came from different parts of England.

[161] Some critics such as Roger Gard have seized upon Austen as a symbol of an "eternal England", whose "unpolitical" works unlike the "political" novels of the great French and Russian novelists of the 19th century reflected the central values of "modern Anglo-Saxon civilisations".

[165] Generating heated debate, Edward Said devoted a chapter of his book Culture and Imperialism (1993) to Mansfield Park, arguing that the peripheral position of "Antigua" and the issue of slavery demonstrated that acceptance of colonialism was an unspoken assumption in Austen's society during the early 19th century.

[170] Brian Southam in a 1995 essay argued that the much discussed scene about the "dead silence" that follows Fanny Price's questions about the status of slaves in the Caribbean refers to the moral decadence of those members of the British gentry who chose to be involved in the abolitionist campaigns of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

[172] Irvine used as examples the naval career of Captain Wentworth in Persuasion; that Sir Thomas Bertram owes a plantation in Antigua while William Price enlists in the Royal Navy in Mansfield Park; and Colonel Brandon is a veteran of military campaigns in the West Indies in Sense and Sensibility.

"[172] Irvine argued that Elinor Dashwood, by arranging for Colonel Brandon to marry her sister Marianne, is finding for him the "home" he lost from experiencing both emotional and physical turmoil while serving in the West Indies.

[174] In this regard, Janet Sorenson in The Grammar of Empire noted that in Austen's books, no characters speak in dialect, and all use the same form of polite "King's English" that was expected of the upper classes.

[189] Directed by Robert Z. Leonard and written in collaboration with the English novelist Aldous Huxley and American screenwriter Jane Murfin, the film was critically well-received, although the plot and characterisations strayed from Austen's original.