IN RUDYARD KIPLING'S “The Janeites” (1924), a humorous fictional account of Austen's influence, a group of soldiers discusses the comfort they get from reading her work. “It's a very select society,” one of them remarks, “an' you've got to be a Janeite in your 'eart, or you won't have any success” in understanding her. “You take it from me,” the soldier says, “there's no one to touch Jane when you're in a tight place” (Debits and Credits, 173). That Austen could appeal to soldiers in the trenches during the First World War as well as to women and schoolgirls speaks volumes about the range of readers she attracted. By the end of the war she was unquestionably considered a major figure in the English literary tradition. Precisely what to make of her, however, began to be the central question occupying scholars who recognized the appeal she had for millions of readers who valued her novels for their fairy-tale quality, and for a more discriminating group who found in her work a critique of the social order she represented so faithfully.

Early Post-War Criticism, 1918–1930

One of the first scholars to devote a considerable portion of his career to a study of Austen was R. Brimley Johnson. Johnson published an edition of Austen's works in 1906. In The Women Novelists (1918) Austen figures prominently in his summation of the merits of the group he calls “The Great Four”: Fanny Burney, Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot.