Novelists From England

"(“What do you owe Jane Austen?”) Endless pleasure. Years and years of delight. (“What did you learn from Jane Austen?”) A great deal about life. (“For example?”) I can't give you an example. You don't get fortune cookie maxims from a great novelist. You learn what life is like and what people are like."

"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 honour unto England's Jane!"

"[T]he attempt to recruit Jane Austen into one of the armies in an ideological war is mistaken... It is indeed useful to compare her to her contemporaries...to confirm her originality and independence, and appreciate how distinctively absent ideology is from her fiction. She ranks not among those novelists like Tolstoy and George Eliot who are in some sense teachers or preachers, but among those like James and Proust, for whom the depiction and analysis of human beings in thought and action are enough. Or in different terms, she is of the school of Sophocles and Shakespeare, not that of Dante and Milton."

"I read Pride and Prejudice when I was about 8 or 9. It was the first adult novel I read and it opened my imagination to the immense possibilities of the world of fiction and, young though I was, produced an immediate response to Jane Austen that has remained as strong today as it was 85 years ago and, I believe, helped to make me a writer."

"Which brings us again, after this long way about, to Jane Austen and her novels, and that troublesome question about them. She was great and they were beautiful, because she and they were honest, and dealt with nature nearly a hundred years ago as realism deals with it to-day. Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material, and Jane Austen was the first and the last of the English novelists to treat material with entire truthfulness. Because she did this, she remains the most artistic of the English novelists, and alone worthy to be matched with the great Scandinavian and Slavic and Latin artists."

"Don't forget books. What would life be without them? Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, William Faulkner. Read the greats-they're great for a reason. They know how to chart the human soul. (p 32)"

"I have been reading Miss Austen's Emma, which I had entirely forgotten, with the greatest enjoyment. I think it an admirable book, & I dare say you will agree with me. Miss Austen is an inimitable painter of quiet life. It would be difficult to say where the interest of Emma lies, yet it does interest strongly. There is no fine writing; no laboured description; no imaginative or ideal touches; no working on the feelings. Its magic must be its truth. It is exquisitely true. Life is presented to us, not as it may be taken in rare situations, in picturesque emergencies, but as we see it everyday. Common, workday life, with here & there a suit of best for Sundays. Yet there is nothing trivial. It is what Alfred calls in one of his unfinished poems "most ideal unideal, most uncommon commonplace." Dignity in the sentiments, dignity in the style. Quite a woman's book — (don't frown, Miss Fytche — I mean it for compliment) — none but a woman & a lady could possess that tact of minute observation, & that delicacy of sarcasm."

"Perhaps my favorite English novelist is Jane Austen."

"Why do the characters in Jane Austen give us a slightly new pleasure each time they come in, as opposed to the merely repetitive pleasure that is caused by a character in Dickens? Why do they combine so well in a conversation, and draw one another out, without seeming to do so, and never perform? The answer to this question can be put in several ways; that, unlike Dickens, she was a real artist, that she never stooped to caricature, etc. But the best reply is that her characters, though smaller than his, are more highly organized. They function all round, and even if her plot made greater demands on them than it does, they would still be adequate."

"I read Madame Bovary and Jane Austen and George Eliot over and over."

"I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched & narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer in both the stories I have read, "Persuasion," and "Pride & Prejudice," is marriageableness. All that interests in any character introduced is still this one, Has he or she money to marry with, & conditions conforming? 'Tis "the nympholepsy of a fond despair," say rather, of an English boarding-house. Suicide is more respectable."

"This is something more than the discovery of a document; it is the discovery of an inspiration. And that inspiration was the inspiration of Gargantua and of Pickwick; it was the gigantic inspiration of laughter."

"She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what she did not — like a sound agnostic."

"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."

"Miss Austen's language deserves closer attention than it has received. She is not indeed one of the great writers of English prose of the early nineteenth century; but she is one of the greatest, because one of the most accurate, writers of dialogue of her own or any age; and of the writers of her period who furnish good and abundant specimens of polite conversation, she is to-day by far the most popular."

"[A]s her would-be biographer, I had to face the fact that information about Jane Austen the woman was limited and fragmentary. She remains for me – as no doubt she would have wished – not an intimate but an acquaintance."

"Jane Austen influenced me very much in a general way. I read her early with great pleasure and often since, and I think it's the, it's the tone is what I've liked about her, very cool, amused, but not ill-tempered tone. What I liked so very much about her is that she's quite ruthless in pointing out weaknesses and making fun, but she never seems in a bad temper, wishing to do down the characters, and I find this very agreeable – this sort of ruthless, good tempered, just, humorous outlook. I also like the mixture of her rather tough, robust judgement combined with a silvery, elegant refinement of manner. I think this contrast between the delicacy of the manner and the robustness of the judgement is very sympathetic to me."

"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 has been criticized as trivial by the same enlightened race of critics as think her incapable of depicting passion. But such a criticism reveals a complete failure to grasp the convention within which her art is constructed. For aesthetic reasons she limits herself, as we have seen, to the mood of comedy and the world of the small gentry in England. But comedy can deal, and always has since the days of the Greeks, with themes as important and significant as those of tragedy: while the life of an English Squire's wife is as serious as the life of any one else: it can no more avoid the central problems that face mankind during its sojourn on this planet. The visible structure of Jane Austen's stories may be flimsy enough; but their, foundations drive deep down into the basic principles of human conduct. On her bit of ivory she has engraved a criticism of life as serious and as considered as Hardy's."

"[I]n Northanger Abbey Jane Austen develops...her version of the revolutionary character, the man or woman who by acting on a system of selfishness, threatens friends of more orthodox principles; and ultimately, through cold-blooded cynicism in relation to the key social institution of marriage, threatens human happiness at a very fundamental level. Isabella Thorpe, Lady Susan, Mary Crawford, all like Isabella pursue the modern creed of self, and as such are Jane Austen's reinterpretation of a standard figure of the period, the desirable, amoral woman whose activities threaten manners and morals. … That Jane Austen is perfectly clear what she is doing can be demonstrated by identifying the same cluster of themes and characters in Sense and Sensibility. Inheriting a set of conservative dogmas, and some impossibly theatrical characters—notably the revolutionary villain—already in her first two full-length novels she produces a more natural equivalent, on a scale appropriate to comedy. Her villains are not only better art than her rivals'; they are also better propaganda. … Her selfish characters are consistently smaller and meaner than their orthodox opponents, the heroines; they are restricted within the bounds of their own being, and their hearts and minds are impoverished. Jane Austen's achievement, the feat of the subtlest technician among the English novelists, is to rethink the material of the conservative novel in terms that are at once naturalistic and intellectually consistent."

"The daughter and sister of clergymen of the Established Church, she began life in the conservative fold, and even as a teenager was the author of a satire on sensibility, Love and Friendship. Two of her first completed novels, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey … display broadly the typical attitudes of the feminine type of conservative novel... The key issue on which virtue is distinguished from vice is the choice of a marriage-partner. The key virtues are prudence and concern for the evidence; the vices are romanticism, self-indulgence, conceit, and, for Jane Austen, other subtle variations upon the broad anti-jacobin target of individualism. … [T]hese last three novels reveal a sense of a hazard to the larger community which distinguishes them from the earlier group: the heroine's ethical choices no longer solely affect her private happiness in life, but are subtly interlinked with the stability and well-being of her society. In this too they reflect the broadening and deepening of range given to the conservative cause in the years 1797–8 by the critical turn in the war, and by the articulate leadership of The Anti-Jacobin. Whatever their actual date of composition, they belong generically, like all Jane Austen's works, to a movement that defines itself by its opposition to revolution."

"The pride of any mother is to give birth to a responsible and successful child."

"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."

"In all her novels, though in varying degrees, Jane Austen regards the characters, good and bad alike, with ironical amusement, because they never see the situation as it really is and as she sees it. This is the deeper source of our unbroken pleasure in reading her. We constantly share her point of view, and are aware of the amusing difference between the fact and its appearance to the actors. If you fail to perceive and enjoy this, you are not really reading Jane Austen. Some readers do not perceive it, and therefore fail to appreciate her. Others perceive it without enjoying it, and they think her cynical. She is never cynical, and not often merely satirical. A cynic or a mere satirist may be intellectually pleased by human absurdities and illusions, but he does not feel them to be good. But to Jane Austen, so far as they are not seriously harmful, they are altogether pleasant, because they are both ridiculous and right."

"[T]he power of the realized conventional form, the delicious happiness Austen makes us feel, must surely be counteracted by a kind of inquiry that is as courageous and sensitive and resistant as Austen's reading of her own predecessors. She knew better than to pretend that powerful fictions are not dangerous. She thus would welcome, I like to think, the probing questions that feminist critics have been teaching us to ask. Her kind of critical spirit, applied … to her kind of works, will not leave those works unmodified. But to me it is reassuring to discover that most of the modifications, most of what we learn by asking the questions raised by feminist critics, leave Jane Austen looking perhaps even greater than she did before."

"[M]ost of us, male and female, are as children compared with this one glorious human being."

"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."

"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."

"I now desire to offer a few observations on them [the novels], and especially on one point, on which my age renders me a competent witness—the fidelity with which they represent the opinions and manners of the class of society in which the author lived early in this century. They do this the more faithfully on account of the very deficiency with which they have been sometimes charged—namely, that they make no attempt to raise the standard of human life, but merely represent it as it was. They certainly were not written to support any theory or inculcate any particular moral, except indeed the great moral which is to be equally gathered from an observation of the course of actual life—namely, the superiority of high over low principles, and of greatness over littleness of mind."

"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."

"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."

"Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings."

"What could I do! Facts are such horrid things!"

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid"

"A very short trial convinced her that a curricle was the prettiest equipage in the world"

"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."

"...from politics, it was an easy step to silence."

"Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?"

"A woman especially, if she has the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can."

"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."

"One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound..."

"Ah! there is nothing like staying at home for real comfort."

"There are people who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves."

"Surprizes are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable."

"Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of."

"...why did we wait for any thing? — why not seize the pleasure at once? — How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!"

"Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does."

"One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."

"Of various admirals I could tell you a great deal: of them and their flags, and the gradation of their pay, and their bickerings and jealousies. But, in general, I can assure you that they are all passed over, and all very ill used. Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat."

"But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them."