Emma Quote by Mary Lascelles

“A story conducted by the time of a clock and calendars alone would be a story not of human beings but of mechanical toys.”

— Mary Lascelles

“In Jane Austen it was the critical faculty that would not be quieted; and that faculty in her, played on men and women.”

— Mary Lascelles

“A clever girl may pass through the phase of foolish miss on the way to sensible woman.”

— Mary Lascelles

“When many story-tellers occupy themselves with a social world which offers no great variety of lively action, their stories will probably resemble one another…

— Mary Lascelles

“Others beside Jane Austen have made their Eltons, though none quite so cooly as she.”

— Mary Lascelles

“Jane Austen's narrative style seems to me to show (especially in the later novels) a curiously chameleon-like faculty; it varies in colour as the…

— Mary Lascelles

“Jane Austen never repeats herself.”

— Mary Lascelles

“Sympathy compounded of liking and compassion in varying proportions evidently seemed to Jane Austen the most natural inventive to imaginative interest in a character.”

— Mary Lascelles

“I suspect that Jane Austen's practice of denying herself the aid of figurative language which, as much as any of her other habits of…

— Mary Lascelles

“The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not…

— Mary Lascelles

“Mannerism, especially when it takes the form of recurrent word or phrase, is by no means easy to represent; there is but a hair's…

— Mary Lascelles

“The sole agents, indeed, in the action of her novels are individual human beings. And the comedy is the outcome of their making fools…

— Mary Lascelles