There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond...

I will only add, God bless you.

Sence and Sensibility, for instance, came out in three separate volumes, as did Pride and Prejudice (so the next time you read one of the ubiquitous time-travel Austen adaptations and somebody picks up a single-volume...

She ventured to hope he did not always read only poetry; and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and...

People who say Jane or talk about Janeites revolt me. The sort that can walk with kings and not lose that common touch. ‘Miss Austen to you’ is what I feel inclined to say.

I never saw quite so wretched an example of what a sea-faring life can do: but to a degree, I know it is the same with them all; they are all knocked about, and exposed...

A naive, excitable teenaged reader is a beautiful thing. Someone who’s never heard of Elizabeth Bennet or Jay Gatsby, until you tell him. And they all still believe in truth. That’s the fun of it.

My new favorite title is How Jane Austen Ruined My Life. I don’t have the courage to read it, though. I’m afraid to discover she’s ruined mine as well.

Eudora Welty singles out for praise Austen’s “habit of seeing both sides of her own subject – of seeing it indeed in the round”. … Both men and women can be vain about their appearances,...

I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my...

The conversation soon turned upon fishing, and she heard Mr. Darcy invite him, with the greatest civility, to fish there as often as he chose while he continued in the neighbourhood, offering at the same...

Darling, in this family we don’t call anyone a novelist who has not written more books than Jane Austen.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged…

Seriously, a thirty-something woman shouldn’t be daydreaming about a fictional character in a two-hundred-year-old world to the point where it interfered with her very real and much more important life and relationships. Of course she...

It would be most right, and most wise, and, therefore must involve least suffering.

You deserve a longer letter than this; but it is my unhappy fate seldom to treat people so well as they deserve.

Her [Mrs Croft’s] manners were open, easy, and decided, like one who had no distrust of herself, and no doubts of what to do; without any approach to coarseness, however, or any want of good...

When the evening was over, Anne could not but be amused at the idea of her coming to Lyme, to preach patience and resignation to a young man whom she had never seen before; nor...