NOVELS
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Mansfield Park (1814)
Emma (1816)
Persuasion (1818)
Northanger Abbey (1818)
SHORTER WORKS
Lady Susan (novella)
The Watsons (incomplete novel)
Sanditon (incomplete novel)
"There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these. There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare, that one can imagine."
Margaret Drabble, in her introduction to "Lady Susan; The Watsons; Sanditon," 1974
Jane lies in Winchester—blessed be her shade!
Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made!
And while the stones of Winchester, or Milsom Street, remain,
Glory, love and honor unto England's Jane.
Rudyard Kipling, 1924
"There have been several revolutions of taste during the last century and a quarter of English literature, and through them all perhaps only two reputations have never been affected by the shifts of fashion: Shakespeare's and Jane Austen's... She has compelled the amazed admiration of writers of the most diverse kinds."
Edmund Wilson, 1944
"Also read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen's very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvement and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!"
Sir Walter Scott, 1826
Jump to ADDITIONAL QUOTES about Jane Austen from famous writers, critics and historical figures over the past two centuries.
"Why We Love Jane Austen" By Syrie James
Jane Austen was a master of irony and nuance, and an astute observer of human nature. Some of her most famous witticisms can be found in her letters; others are voiced by her characters—not all of whom were expressing her personal sentiments.
LOVE & MARRIAGE
A woman of seven and twenty can never hope to inspire affection again.
-Sense and Sensibility
A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.
-Pride and Prejudice
I pay very little regard to what any young person says on the subject of marriage. If they profess a disinclination for it, I only set it down that they have not yet seen the right person.
-Mansfield Park
I consider everybody as having a right to marry once in their lives for love, if they can.
-Letter to Cassandra, 1808
Do anything rather than marry without affection.
-Pride and Prejudice
To be so bent on marriage—to pursue a man merely for the sake of situation—is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great evil, but to a woman of education and feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest. I would rather be a teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a man I did not like.
-The Watsons
She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older.
-Persuasion
...that expression of 'violently in love' is so hackneyed, so doubtful, so indefinite... It is as often applied to feelings which arise from an half-hour's acquaintance, as to a real, strong attachment.
-Pride and Prejudice
...when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.
-Northanger Abbey
OPPORTUNITY
...why did we wait for any thing? Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!
-Emma
DANCING
To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.
-Pride and Prejudice
I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage. Fidelity and complaisance are the principal duties of both... You will allow that in both, man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal... that when once entered into, they belong exclusively to each other till the moment of its dissollution... that it is their duty, each to endeavour to give the other no cause for wishing that he or she had bestowed themselves elsewhere.
-Northanger Abbey
TRUTH
Modesty...is very well in its way, but really a little common honesty is sometimes quite as becoming.
-Northanger Abbey
Facts are such horrid things!
-Lady Susan
READING & WRITING
It is only a novel... or, in short, some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.
-Northanger Abbey
You are now collecting your people delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life. Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.
-Letter to her niece Anna (who was writing a book of her own), 1814
The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
-Northanger Abbey
At length, quite exhausted by the attempt to be amused with her own book, which she had only chosen because it was the second volume of his, she gave a great yawn and said, "How pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!"
-Pride and Prejudice
...but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.
-The Juvenilia of Jane Austen
Of course they had fallen in love over poetry.
-Persuasion
He and I should not in the least agree, of course, in our ideas of novels and heroines;—pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked.
-Letter to her niece Fanny, 1817
I begin already to weigh my words & sentences more than I did, & am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my ideas flow as fast as the rain in the storecloset, it would be charming.
-Letter to Cassandra, 1809
I could no more write a [historical] romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter.
-Letter to James Stanier Clarke, The Prince Regent's Librarian, 1816
CORRESPONDENCE
Oh! The blessing of a female correspondent, when one is really interested in the absent!
-Emma
Expect a most agreeable letter, for not being overburdened with subject (having nothing at all to say), I shall have no check to my genius from beginning to end.
-Letter to Cassandra, 1801
MONEY
Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor—which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.
-Letter to her niece Fanny, 1817
People always live forever when there is an annuity to be paid them.
-Sense and Sensibility
A single woman with a narrow income must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid, the proper sport of boys and girls; but a single woman of good fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else.
-Emma
Nothing amuses me more than the easy manner with which everybody settles the abundance of those who have a great deal less than themselves.
-Mansfield Park
It is very difficult for the prosperous to be humble.
-Emma
HAPPINESS
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
-Mansfield Park
There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere.
-Mansfield Park
RIDICULE
For what do we live, but to make sport of our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?
-Pride and Prejudice
I meant to be uncommonly clever in taking so decided a dislike to him, without any reason. It is such a spur to one's genius, such an opening for wit, to have a dislike of that kind. One may be continually abusive without saying anything just; but one cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.
-Pride and Prejudice
BEAUTY
To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.
-Northanger Abbey
Varnish and gilding hide many stains.
-Mansfield Park
FASHION
A woman can never be too fine while she is all in white.
-Mansfield Park
I bought some Japan ink... & next week shall begin my operations on my hat, on which you know my principal hopes of happiness depend.
-Letter to Cassandra, 1798
Now nothing can satisfy me but I must have a straw hat, of the riding hat shape, like Mrs. Tilson's... I am really very shocking; but it will not be dear at a Guinea.
-Letter to Cassandra, 1811
My cloak came on Tuesday, & tho' I expected a good deal, the beauty of the lace astonished me. It is too handsome to be worn, almost too handsome to be looked at.
-Letter to Cassandra, 1800
It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire.
-Northanger Abbey
Your sentiments so nobly expressed on the different excellencies of Indian & English muslins, & the judicious preference you give the former, have excited in me an admiration of which I can alone give an adequate idea, by assuring you that it is nearly equal to what I feel for myself.
-The Juvenilia of Jane Austen (Frederic and Elfrida)
NATURE
To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.
-Mansfield Park
KNOWLEDGE
A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
-Northanger Abbey
EDUCATION
I was therefore entered at Oxford and have been properly idle ever since.
-Sense and Sensibility
EFFICIENCY
The power of doing anything with quickness is always much prized by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.
-Pride and Prejudice
SILLINESS
Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.
-Emma
MEN AND WOMEN
In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.
-Northanger Abbey
If there is any thing disagreeable going on, men are always sure to get out of it.
-Persuasion
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
-Emma
BEST FIRST LINE EVER WRITTEN
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
-Pride and Prejudice
SELF
We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.
-Mansfield Park
What wild imaginations one forms, where dear self is concerned!
-Persuasion
Those who tell their own story, you know, must be listened to with caution.
-Sanditon
"(Jane Austen's novels) appear to be compact of abject truth. Their events are excruciatingly unimportant; and yet, with Robinson Crusoe, they will probably outlast all Fielding, Scott, George Elliot, Thackeray, and Dickens. The art is so consummate that the secret is hidden; peer at them as hard as one may; shake them; take them apart; one cannot see how it is done."
Thornton Wilder, 1938
"I was a little mortified to find you had not admitted the name of Miss Austen into your list of favorites... Her flights are not lofty, she does not soar on an eagle's wings, but she is pleasing, interesting, equable, yet amusing. I count on your making some apology for this omission."
Chief Justice John Marshall, in a letter to Joseph Story, 1826
"Miss Austen was surely a great novelist. What she did, she did perfectly.... She wrote of the times in which she lived, of the class of people with which she associated, and in the language which was usual to her as an educated lady. Of romance—what we generally mean when we speak of romance—she had no tinge: heroes and heroines with wonderful adventures there are none in her novels. Of great criminals and hidden crimes she tells us nothing. But she places us in a circle of gentlemen and ladies, and charms us while she tells us with an unconscious accuracy how men should act to women, and women act to men. It is not that her people are all good; and, certainly, they are not all wise. The faults of some are the anvils on which the virtues of others are hammered till they are bright as steel. In the comedy of folly, I know no novelist who has beaten her. The letters of Mr. Collins, a clergyman in Pride and Prejudice, would move laughter in a low-church archbishop."
Anthony Trollope, 1870
"The key to Jane Austen's fortune with posterity has been in part the extraordinary grace of her facility... as if she sometimes over her work basket fell... into woolgathering, and her dropped stitches... were afterwards picked up as... little master-strokes of imagination."
Henry James, 1905
"...Jane Austen, of course, wise in her neatness, trim in her sedateness; she never fails, but there are few or none like her."
Edith Wharton, 1925
"To believe (Jane Austen) limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond, it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond... Look through the lattice-work of her neat sentences, joined together with the bright nails of craftsmanship, painted with the gay varnish of wit, and you will see women haggard with desire or triumphant with love."
Rebecca West, 1928
"I am inclined to say in desperation, read it yourself and kick out every sentence that isn't as Jane Austen would have written it in prose. Which is, I admit, impossible. But when you do get a limpid line in perfectly straight normal order, isn't it worth any other ten?"
Ezra Pound, in a letter to Laurence Binyon, 1938
"I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen. Being able to sit at home at the parsonage and your books would be very famous and occasionally you would correspond with the Prince of Wales's secretary."
J. K. Rowling, 2003