This made my father laugh. ‘Mary made a cake, did she? Well, well. Better that than she should make a cake for herself, I suppose.’Peter then burst out: ‘Why must you always be making a...

Jane Austen easily used half a page describing someone else’s eyes; she would not appreciate summarizing her reading tastes in ten titles.

She is never alone when she has Her Books. Books, to her, are Friends. Give her Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Meredith or Hardy, and she is Lost – lost in a world of her own....

Money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it.

As for admiration, it was always very welcome when it came, but she did not depend on it.

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 I don’t think I can have even that, anymore.

Everytime I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Suddenly a force greater than my common sense—which, I’ll admit, has been pretty faulty lately, propels me—and I find myself creeping up the long staircase to the forbidden second floor. I need to see Michael’s...

In the Blue Room, Cora Cash was trying to concentrate on her book. Cora found most novels hard to sympathise with — all those plain governesses — but this one had much to recommend it....

It was gratitude; gratitude, not merelyfor having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him.

The loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable – that one false step involves in her endless ruin – that her reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful – and that she...

No one can withstand the charm of such a mystery.

Okay, I may cry just a bit but it’s only because it’s an Austen-era reproduction and anybody would feel the pain of destroying something so lovely.

Peter was now standing very close – as if he wanted to comfort me – as if he knew how hurt I felt that Mrs Knowles had not asked me to play or to sing....

If there is a heaven, Jane Austen is sitting in a small room with Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, listening to Duran Duran, forever. If there’s a hell, she’s standing.

Lean on me,” someone says in Jane Austen to a woman he scarcely knows, and there’s no question but that she will, that she takes it for granted.

Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing after all.

I lay it down as a general rule, Harriet, that if a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him.

It is a most repulsive quality, indeed,’ said he. ‘Oftentimes very convenient, no doubt, but never pleasing. There is safety in reserve, but no attraction. One cannot love a reserved person.’‘Not till the reserve ceases...

Einer der Altmeister des englischen Romans, William Makepeace Thackeray, nannte das Wort Finis am Ende eines Erzählwerkes einmal ein “trübsinniges Wort”. Das mag zutreffen, wenn man lediglich meint, von einer liebgewordenen, vertrauten Umgebung Abschied nehmen...

Jane Austen never repeats herself.

In suiting the action to the words, however, I perceived that the stars were all wrong.That was my undoing. I had looked up unthinkingly, anticipating the familiar, and, finding it gone, began to cry like...

The celestial brightness of Pride and Prejudice is unequalled even in Jane Austen’s other work; after a life of much disappointment and grief, in which some people would have seen nothing but tedium and emptiness,...

It’s a truth universally acknowledged…

I can easily believe it. Women of that class have great opportunities, and if they are intelligent may be well worth listening to. Such varieites of human nature as they are in the habit of...

I have observed…in the course of my life, that if things are going outwardly one month, they are sure to mend the next.

Her beauty was classic, timeless. Just the line of her neck, the curve of her cheek, the way the dress draped her hips, was enough to stop the room. When she’d turned away to look...

It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed.

I want to turn 21 as soon as possible not so that I can drink (how horrific!) but so that I can say, “I am ONE and TWENTY.