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Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775 -1817) was a gifted English writer and novelist, famous chiefly for six novels, four of which - Sense and Sensibility (1811) , Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815) - were first published anonymously, and the two others - Persuasion (1818), and Northanger Abbey (1818), posthumously.

She was daughter of a clergyman in North Hampshire, member of a quiet family circle, occupied herself in writing without eye to publication, and only in mature womanhood thought of writing for the press. Her interest being throughout in ordinary quiet cultured life, and the delineation of it, which she achieved in an inimitably charming manner in her novels. "She showed once for all," says Professor Saintsbury, "the capabilities of the very commonest and most ordinary life, if sufficiently observed and selected, and combined with due art, to furnish forth prose fiction not merely that would pass, but that should be of the absolutely first quality as literature. She is the mother of the English 19th-century novel, as Scott is the father of it".

Wisdom & Quotes

  • Those who do not complain are never pitied.
- Pride and Prejudice
  • For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?
- Pride and Prejudice
  • The power of doing anything with quickness is always much prized by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.
- Pride and Prejudice
  • Is not general incivility the very essence of love?
- Pride and Prejudice
  • A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.
- Pride and Prejudice
  • It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
- Pride and Prejudice
  • I am pleased that you have learned to love a hyacinth, the mere habit of learning to love is the thing.
  • If a woman doubts to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought refuse him. If she can hesitate as to 'Yes', she ought to say 'No', directly.
  • How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!
- Persuasion
  • All the privilege I claim for my own sex… is that of loving longest, when existence or hope is gone.
- Persuasion
  • To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.
- Mansfield Park
  • Selfishness must always be forgiven… because there is no hope of a cure.
- Mansfield Park
  • It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.
- Sense and Sensibility
  • The less said the better.
- Sense and Sensibility
  • Vanity working on a weak head produces every sort of mischief.
- Emma
  • It is very difficult for the prosperous to be humble.
- Emma
  • One cannot have too large a party.
- Emma
  • If there is anything disagreeable going on, men are sure to get out of it.
- Northanger Abbey
  • A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
- Northanger Abbey
  • I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.
- letter to her sister Cassandra, December 24, 1798

Charles Lamb

Page last modified on Friday January 14, 2022 12:38:54 GMT-0000