The first decade or so of Jane Austen commentary corresponds to a gradual but distinct change in attitude to the novel genre and to novelists; it might be argued that this change was in great measure due to efforts made during the period to analyse and appreciate a somewhat puzzling newcomer to the fictional scene. Reviewers had become accustomed to treating the novels which came under their scrutiny with a degree of contempt; some might be better than others, but they were on the whole hardly worth serious consideration. More than sixty years after Johnson's authoritative statement in Rambler 4 there still lingered a necessity for fiction to appear to preach a direct and unequivocal moral lesson in order to be saved from condemnation as, at best, trivial escapism, at worst, moral depravity. On this basis some novels were regarded with respect – those of Frances Burney, for instance, and the early fiction of Charlotte Smith. But a host of later novels seemed opportunistic in their overt appeal to the unthinking mass of readers, and were for this reason often denounced by reviewers. Lachrymose fiction deriving from Rousseau and Mackenzie, ever more sensational Radcliffean Gothic, and, as the conflict with revolutionary France got under way, novels used for political propaganda, both radical and conservative, ‘Jacobin’ and ‘anti-Jacobin’, all attracted criticism from some commentators, often on the grounds of improbability or sensationalism. Jane Austen's first published novel could obviously not be charged with either fault; if anything it seemed by comparison rather bland and unexciting. Early reviewers were somewhat at a loss as to how it should be judged.

Sense and Sensibility was advertised as an ‘extraordinary novel’ in the Morning Chronicle in 1811, the year of its publication, and reviewers were aware that they were faced with something unusual, but at first they hardly had the means to take up the challenge. Individual readers, as is evidenced by a mass of informal comment in letters and diaries, were often intrigued and enthusiastic,1 but more public commentators, though they invariably wrote anonymously, felt it incumbent upon them to be cautious.