At the time Jane Austen’s novels\r\nwere published – between 1811 and 1818 – English literature was not part of any\r\nacademic curriculum. In addition, fiction was under strenuous attack. Certain\r\nreligious and political groups felt novels had the power to make so-called\r\nimmoral characters so interesting that young readers would identify with them;\r\nthese groups also considered novels to be of little practical use. Even\r\nColeridge, certainly no literary reactionary, spoke for many when the asserted\r\nthat “novel-reading occasions the destruction of the mind’s powers.”
These attitudes towards novels help\r\nexplain why Austen received little attention from early nineteenth-century\r\nliterary cities. (In any case a novelist published anonymously, as Austen was,\r\nwould not be likely to receive much critical attention.) The literary response\r\nthat was accorded to her, however, was often as incisive as twentieth-century\r\ncriticism. In his attack in 1816 on novelistic portrayals “outside of ordinary experience,”\r\nfor example. Scott made an insightful remark about the merits of Austen’s\r\nfiction.
Her novels, wrote Scott, “present to\r\nthe reader an accurate and exact picture of ordinary everyday people and\r\nplaces, reminiscent of seventeenth-century Flemish painting.” Scott did not use\r\nthe word ‘realism’, but he undoubtedly used a standard of realistic probability\r\nin judging novels. The critic Whately did not use the word ‘realism’, either,\r\nbut he expressed agreement with Scott’s evaluation, and went on to suggest the possibilities\r\nfor moral instruction in what we have called Austen’s ‘realistic method’ her\r\ncharacters, wrote Whately, are persuasive agents for moral truth since they are\r\nordinary persons “so clearly evoked that we feel an interest in their fate as\r\nif it were our own.” Moral instruction, explained Whately, is more likely to be\r\neffective when conveyed through recongnizably human and interesting characters\r\nthan when imparted by a sermonizing narrator. Whitely especially praised Austen’s\r\nability to create character who “mingle goodness and villainy, weakness and\r\nvirtue, as in life they are always mingled. “Whitely concluded his remarks by\r\ncomparing Austen’s art of characterization to Dickens’, starting his preference\r\nfor Austen’s.
Yet, the response of\r\nnineteenth-century literary critics to Austen was not always so laudatory, and\r\noften anticipated the reservations of twentieth-century literary critics. An\r\nexample of such a response was Lewes complaint in 1859 that Austen’s range of\r\nsubject and characters was too narrow. Praising her verisimilitude, Lewes added\r\nthat, nonetheless her focus was too often only upon the unlofty and the\r\ncommonplace. (Twentieth-century Marxists, on the other hand, were to complain\r\nabout what they saw as her exclusive emphasis on a lofty upper middle class.)\r\nIn any case having being rescued by literary critics from neglect and indeed\r\ngradually lionized by them, Austen steadily reached, by the mid-nineteenth\r\ncentury, the enviable pinnacle of being considered controversial.
How would you describe the synonym\r\nof the word “Verisimilitude”?