A collection of responses to Austen's novel (that includes, in fact, all the writers quoted below) is available on the Jane Austen Web site hosted by Brooklyn CUNY. Perhaps the most influential critique of Emma written during Jane Austen's lifetime was Sir Walter Scott's in the March 1816 edition of Quarterly Review, which that Web site contains. Scott described her as writing "a class of fictions which has arisen almost in our own times, and which draws the characters and incidents . . . more immediately from the current of ordinary life than was permitted by the former rules of the novel." For Scott, Austen's brand of realism was striking and unique, setting it apart from the false sentiment of typical romances or the lurid phantasms of Gothic tales. He praised Austen for "copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the...