Jane Austen Quotes (1775-1817)

“To yield readily--easily--to the persuasion of a friend is no merit.... To yield without conviction is no compliment to the understanding of either.””

“Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character; vanity of person and of situation.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.”

“Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then. It is something to think of, and gives her a sort of distinction among her companions.”

“Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct.”

“You could not shock her more than she shocks me; Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass. It makes me most uncomfortable to see An English spinster of the middle class Describe the amorous effects of "brass," Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety The economic basis of society.”

“As she grew up, the politics of the day occupied very little of her attention, but she probably shared the feeling of moderate Toryism which prevailed in her family. She was well acquainted with the old periodicals from the 'Spectator' downwards. Her knowledge of Richardson's works was such as no one is likely again to acquire, now that the multitude and the merits of our light literature have called off the attention of readers from that great master. Every circumstance narrated in Sir Charles Grandison, all that was ever said or done in the cedar parlour, was familiar to her; and the wedding days of Lady L. and Lady G. were as well remembered as if they had been living friends. Amongst her favourite writers, Johnson in prose, Crabbe in verse, and Cowper in both, stood high.”

“Jane Austen? I feel that I am approaching dangerous ground. The reputation of Jane Austen is surrounded by cohorts of defenders who are ready to do murder for their sacred cause. They are nearly all fanatics. They will not listen. If anyone “went for” Jane, anything might happen to him. He would assuredly be called on to resign from his clubs...I do not even agree that Jane was a great novelist. She was a great little novelist. She is marvellous, intoxicating: she has unique wit, vast quantities of common sense, a most agreeable sense of proportion, much narrative skill. And she is always readable. But her world is a tiny world, and even of that tiny world she ignores, consciously or unconsciously, the fundamental factors. She did not know enough of the world to be a great novelist. She had not the ambition to be a great novelist. She knew her place; her present “fans” do not know her place, and their antics would without doubt have excited Jane's lethal irony.”

“Jane Austen … provides, at scores of points, a commentary that corrects any naive over-identification that we are tempted to commit. … Many readers have resisted that corrective. … Critics have often objected, for example, to the presence of a persistent voice that could allow itself, at what conventionally should have been the moment of supreme passion, to undermine the conventional effects with the famous (or infamous) narrative intrusion. … Some readers have considered such passages to be dodges, signs of Austen's own sexual inhibitions or lack of novelistic skill. … I suggest instead that they are signs of a novelist who knows her double task: how to abide by the demands of a conventional form, while making the whole thing work for matters unconventional.”

“Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. … I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace (everyday) face; carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.”

“The essence of her certainty is that the reforms she perceives to be necessary are within the attitudes of individuals; she calls for no general changes in the world of the established lesser landed gentry. … Her distinctions between true gentlemanliness and the shell of it are keen, perhaps because—like Elizabeth Bennet—she has experienced social rebuffs at first hand. She is certainly no sycophant of wealth or rank, and she does not deal intimately with—or apparently much like—the great aristocracy. The class she deals with has local and not national importance: in eighteenth-century terms, she is a Tory rather than a Whig. She believes that the gentleman—as her words "consequence" and "usefulness" imply—derives his personal dignity from the contributions he makes at the head of an organic, hierarchical, small community. It is for such a community, ideally perceived, that her novels speak... Jane Austen's novels belong decisively to one class of partisan novels, the conservative. Intellectually she is orthodox... Her important innovations are technical and stylistic modifications within a clearly defined and accepted genre.”

“Comedy was implicit in the manner in which she told her story. Her irony, her delicate ruthless irony, was of the substance of her style. It never obtruded itself; sometimes it only glinted out in a turn of phrase. But it was never absent for more than a paragraph; and her most straightforward piece of exposition was tart with its perfume.”

“Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected women from truth, were burst by the Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew more about men than either of them. Jane Austen may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her.”