In A Fine Brush on Ivory, his appreciation of novelist Jane Austen, Richard Jenkyns remarks that in Austen scholarship, there are pressure that cause ordinary critical circumspection to break down. Principal among those pressures is the peculiar affection in which the person of Jane Austen is held by many readers. This affection is not altogether explained by admiration for he genius, nor is it entirely a symptom of nostalgia for her orderly, decorous, even mysterious life. Writer has led critics to approach her work in mostly biographical or historical ways, often in defiance of other critical fashions, especially the various formal approaches that have dominated modern literary criticism.