In 1832, Jane Austen novels featured in a series of cheap, illustrated reprints of Standard Novels published by Richard Bentley, but these were not best-sellers: Austen's work was still read mostly by a small but appreciative middle-class readership. Her fortunes were buttressed by critical appreciation in the academy, and her novels attained stratospheric popularity late in the twentieth century thanks to their dazzling new afterlife in the popular BBC TV and film adaptations of the mid-1990s. Despite Austen's increasing professionalism during her career, she earned much less in her lifetime than contemporaries such as Maria Edgeworth (£11 062, 8s, and 10d) or Frances Burney (£4280). Another popular – and didactic – genre was the conduct novel. Modern readers find it difficult to appreciate conduct novels, and hence tend to underestimate their popularity.