Atlantic ocean Quote by Rebecca West

“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.…

— David Cecil

“...all the great issues in human life make their appearance on Jane Austen's narrow stage. True, it's only the stage of petty domestic circumstance,…

— ian watt

“Jane Austen’s world is a unique wedge of history, immortalized by her wonderful books. It is ironic that I am fascinated by the Regency…

— Anonymous

“(Jane Austen) is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.”

— Virginia Woolf

“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

“Miss Austen’s novels … seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius,…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing of the thoughts of their characters. ”

— Mary Lascelles

Jane Austen has often been praised as a natural historian. She is a naturalist among tame animals. She does not study men (as Dostoevsky…

— Robert Wilson Lynd

“Today we are less accustomed to look for universal norms in what we read ... partly because we tend to see life, and therefore…

— Susannah Carson

“I cannot imagine a world in which one can read Jane Austen only once.”

— Laurie Viera Rigler

Jane Austen was an extraordinary woman; to actually be able to survive as a novelist in those days - unmarried - was just unheard…

— Julie Walters

Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.

— Mark Haddon