[On being told that Fanny Knight
was reading her letters to Cassandra:]
"I am gratified by her having pleasure in what I write -- but I wish the
knowledge of my being exposed to her discerning Criticism may not hurt my
stile, by inducing too great a solicitude. I begin already to weigh my
words and sentences more than I did, and am looking about for a sentiment,
an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my
Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the store-closet it would be charming."
-- letter of January 24, 1809
This is pretty much a disorganized collection of comments by Jane Austen
and others (mainly 19th century); there is no High LitCrit ("yes; I cannot
speak well enough to be unintelligible" -- Northanger Abbey,
chapter 16). See also
Poems on Jane Austen.
"I flatter myself, however, that you can understand very little
of it from this description. -- Heaven forbid that I should ever offer such
encouragement to Explanations as to give a clear one on any occasion
myself!"
-- Jane Austen, letter of June 2
1799
Jane Austen never wrote down a serious self-conscious analysis or manifesto
of her artistic powers and goals, so that all we have are incidental
statements in some of her letters. These are frequently facetious, or part of
informal letters to family members (in
Mr. Clarke's case she was tactfully trying to get
rid of a bore), and should not necessarily be taken as solemn statements of
deeply-held views.
James Stanier Clarke was the
Prince Regent's librarian, and transmitted
to her the Prince's request that she dedicate her next work
(Emma) to him, an honour that
Jane Austen would probably rather have done without (see
her
letter on the infidelities of the Prince and his wife). Some of
Mr. Clarke's
"helpful" suggestions showed up in the Plan
for a Novel. [More complete versions of these letters, as printed
in Austen-Leigh's Memoir, are also
available on-line.]
"...I also, dear Madam, wished to be allowed to ask you to delineate in
some future Work the Habits of Life and Character and enthusiasm of a
Clergyman -- who should pass his time between
the metropolis & the Country... -- Fond
of and entirely engaged in Literature -- no man's Enemy
but his own."
"I am quite honoured by your thinking me capable of drawing such a
clergyman as you gave the sketch of... But I assure you I am not.
The comic part of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the
enthusiastic, the literary. Such a man's conversation must be on subjects of
science and philosophy, of which I know nothing; or must occasionally be
abundant in allusions and quotations which a woman who, like me,
knows only her mother tongue, and
has read very little in that, would be totally without
the power of giving. A
classical education,
or at any rate a
very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern,
appears to me quite indispensable for the person who would do justice to your
clergyman; and I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the
most unlearned and ill-informed female who
ever dared to be an authoress."
March 27th, 1816, J. S. Clarke to Miss Austen:
"The Prince Regent has... been pleased
to appoint me Chaplain and Private English Secretary to the
Prince of Cobourg. Perhaps when you again appear in
print you may chuse to dedicate your volumes to Prince
Leopold: any historical romance, illustrative of the history of the august
House of Cobourg, would just now be very interesting."
"You are very kind in your hints as to the sort of composition which
might recommend me at present, and I am fully sensible that an historical
romance, founded on the House of Saxe Cobourg, might be
much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of
domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a
romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious
romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were
indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or
other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first
chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though
I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail
in any other."
He was engaged to the Prince Regent's
daughter. After their marriage, she soon died in childbirth; he later became
the first King of Belgium, and an adviser to Queen Victoria.
Anna was working on a novel of her own at
the time, and showed manuscripts to Jane Austen and
Cassandra. These comments reveal some
of the principles that Jane Austen followed in her own writings
(see
"Limitations"). [The complete text of these letters
is also available on-line.]
"...we [Cassandra and herself]
think you had better not leave England. Let the Portmans go to Ireland, but
as you know nothing of the manners there, you had better not go with them.
Stick to Bath and the Foresters. There you
will be quite at home."
"I have scratched out Sir Thos. from walking with the other men to the
stables, &c. the very day after his breaking his arm -- for, though I
find your papa did walk out immediately after his arm was
set, I think it can be so little usual as to appear unnatural in a
book."
"You describe a sweet place, but your descriptions are often more minute
than will be liked. You give too many particulars of right hand & left."
"You are now collecting your People delightfully, getting them exactly
into such a spot as is the delight of my life; -- 3 or 4 Families in a Country
village is the very thing to work on -- & I hope you will write a great
deal more, & make full use of them while they are so very favourably
arranged."
This comment to her nephew has been famous (or infamous) since its
publication in her brother Henry's
"Biographical Notice" in 1817, even though it is probably one of the most
facetious of all her proclamations, in its way:
"What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full
of Variety and Glow? -- How could I join them on to the little bit (two Inches
wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect
after much labour?"
In Jane Austen's era, novels were often depreciated as trash; Coleridge's
opinion was that "where the reading of novels prevails as a habit, it
occasions in time the entire destruction of the powers of the mind". But Jane
Austen once wrote in a letter that she and her family were
"great Novel-readers, & not ashamed of
being so", and in her novel
Northanger Abbey she gives
her "Defense of the Novel" (even though she is also making fun of the
falseness to real life of many novels of the era
throughout Northanger
Abbey).
``The progress of the friendship between Catherine [Morland] and
Isabella was quick as its beginning had been warm... and if a rainy morning
deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in
defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together.
Yes, novels; -- for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so
common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very
performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding -- joining
with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works,
and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she
accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with
disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine
of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve
of it. Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such
effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in
threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not
desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have
afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other
literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much
decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as
our readers. And while the abilities of the
nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects
and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton,
Pope, and Prior, with a paper from
the Spectator, and a chapter from
Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens,
-- there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing
the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only
genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. "I am no novel-reader -- I seldom
look into novels -- Do not imagine that I often read novels -- It is really
very well for a novel." -- Such is the common cant. -- "And what are you
reading, Miss --?" "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while
she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is
only Cecilia, or
Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some
work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most
thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties,
the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the
best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume
of the Spectator, instead of such a work,
how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the
chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous
publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young
person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the
statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of
conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too,
frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could
endure it.''
A series of essays originally published 1711-1712. Jane Austen attacks
this favorite of the literary elites as being open to much the same
accusations which the elites make against popular novels.
"Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious
subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in
fault themselves, to tolerable comfort."
-- Mansfield Park
"I have read [Byron's] The Corsair, mended my
petticoat, and have nothing else to do."
-- Jane Austen, letter of March 5, 1814
Jane Austen limited her subject-matter in a number of ways in her
six novels (though her early
Juvenilia and her letters often did not
conform to these limitations; that she knew about a number of things she did
not choose to treat in her novels can also be seen from her glancing allusions
to such topics as slavery). Many of these
limitations are due to her artistic integrity in not describing what she
herself was not personally familiar with (or in avoiding clichéd plot
devices common in the literature of her day).
She never handles the (conventionally masculine) topic of politics.
She never uses servants, small tradesmen, cottagers, etc. as more than
purely incidental characters. Conversely, she does not describe the high
nobility (the highest ranking "on-stage" characters are
baronets), and (unlike present-day
writers of modern "Regency" novels, or some of her contemporaries) she does
not describe London high society.
She confines herself to the general territory that she herself has
visited and is familiar with (more or less the southern half of
England). (See her advice
to her niece.)
In her novels there is no violence (the closest approaches are the duel
between Colonel Brandon and Willoughby in
Sense and Sensibility, in
which neither is hurt, and the indefinite menacements of the Gypsies towards
Harriet Smith and Miss Bickerton in
Emma), and no crime (except for
the poultry-thief at the end of
Emma).
She never uses certain hackneyed plot devices then common, such as
mistaken identities, doubtful and/or aristocratic parentage, and
hidden-then-rediscovered wills. In
Emma, Harriet Smith's parentage
is actually not very mysterious (as Mr. Knightley had suspected all along).
Jane Austen had exuberantly parodied this type of plot in Henry and
Eliza, one of her Juvenilia:
[Wife to husband:] "Four months after you were gone, I was
delivered of this Girl, but dreading your just resentment at her not proving
the Boy you wished, I took her to a Haycock and laid her down. A few weeks
afterwards, you returned, and fortunately for me, made no enquiries. Satisfied
within myself of the wellfare of my Child, I soon forgot that I had one,
insomuch that when we shortly afterward found her in the very Haycock I had
placed her, I had no more idea of her being my own than you had."
In Jane Austen's works there is hardly any male
sexual predation or assaults on female virtue -- a favorite device of
novelists of the period (even in a novel such as Burney's
Evelina, which has no rapes or abductions to remote farmhouses,
this is a constant theme). The only possible case is the affair between
Willoughby and the younger Eliza Williams in
Sense and Sensibility
(about which little information is divulged in the novel) -- since
Lydia Bennet of
Pride and Prejudice and Maria
Bertram of Mansfield Park more
or less throw themselves at
George Wickham and Henry
Crawford respectively. Also, the elder Eliza Williams in
Sense and Sensibility is
more likely tempted astray because she is a weak personality trapped in a
wretchedly unhappy marriage (remember that almost the only grounds for
divorce was the wife's infidelity),
rather than because of any extraordinary arts or persuasions used by her
seducer. And finally, whatever the complex of motives involved in the
Mrs. Clay-Mr. Elliot affair in
Persuasion, it can hardly be
regarded as the seduction of a female by a sexually predatory male. In Jane
Austen's last incomplete fragment,
Sanditon, it is true that
Sir Edward Denham likes to think of
himself as a predatory male, but he is described as such an ineffectual
fool that it is difficult to believe that he would have accomplished any of
his designs against the beauteous Clara Brereton, if Jane Austen had finished
the work.
Note that all these affairs take place entirely "off-stage" (except
for a few encounters of flirtation between Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford,
long before she runs away with him), and are not described in any detail.
No one dies "on stage" in one of her novels, and almost no one dies at
all during the main period of the events of each novel (except for Lord
Ravenshaw's grandmother in Mansfield
Park and Mrs. Churchill in
Emma).
The illnesses that occur (Jane's in
Pride and Prejudice and Louisa
Musgrove's in Persuasion) are
not milked for much pathos (Marianne's in
Sense and Sensibility is a
partial exception, but Marianne is condemned for bringing her illness on
herself). And Mrs. Smith in
Persuasion (who takes a
decidedly non-pathetic view of her own illness) pours cold water on Anne
Elliot's ideas of the "ardent, disinterested, self-denying attachment, [...]
heroism, fortitude, patience, resignation"
to be found in a sick-room. And in
Sanditon, written while
she was suffering from her own eventually-fatal
illness, Jane Austen made fun of several hypochondriac characters.
(See also
the parody of an affecting sick-room scene
she wrote when she was seventeen years old.)
"Mrs. F. A. has had one fainting fit lately; it came on
as usual after eating a hearty dinner, but did not last long."
-- Jane Austen, letter of January 7 1807
The only person who actually faints in one of Jane Austen's novels is
the silly Harriet Smith of Emma
(since one rather suspects the genuineness of the "fainting fit" that Lucy
Steele is reported to have been driven into by the furious Mrs. John
Dashwood, after the discovery of Lucy's engagement to Edward Ferrars in
Sense and Sensibility). On
three occasions, Fanny Price of Mansfield
Park imagines to herself that she is on the point of fainting, and
once Elinor Dashwood thinks that her sister Marianne is about to faint, but
neither Fanny or Marianne ever does. And Elinor Dashwood, at one critical
moment in Sense and
Sensibility, feels herself to be "in no danger of an hysterical fit
or a swoon".
Jane Austen's parsimony in faintings in her novels does not apply to her
Juvenilia, where she mocks the propensity to
faint of the conventional novel-heroine of the day. So Elfrida in
Frederic & Elfrida "fainted &
was in such a hurry to have a succession of fainting fits, that she had
scarcely patience enough to recover from one before she fell into another".
Notoriously, Jane Austen hardly ever quotes from a conversation between
men with no women present (or overhearing). However, despite some assertions
that she never includes such dialogue, there is at least
one clear example -- a briefly-described encounter
between Sir Thomas Bertram and Edmund in
Mansfield Park. (A less clear
possibility is Sir Thomas Bertram's chiding of his son Tom when he has to sell
the Mansfield clerical "living", in Chapter 3 of
Mansfield Park.)
She is also
sparing of describing the internal thoughts and emotions of male characters
(thus in Pride and Prejudice, much of
Darcy's admiration for
Elizabeth Bennet is expressed by
means of convenient conversations with
Caroline Bingley).
She tends
to glide over the more passionately romantic moments of her
characters, not describing closely lovers' embraces and endearments.
So in the marriage proposal scene in Pride and
Prejudice the quoted dialogue breaks off just before the critical
point, giving way to the following report: "He
[Darcy] expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man
violently in love can be supposed to do". Similarly in
Emma: "She spoke then, on
being so entreated [with a proposal]. What did she say? Just what
she ought, of course. A lady always does."
In fact Jane Austen had something of an aversion to sappy language;
thus in Pride and Prejudice she
has Mrs. Gardiner question
conventional romantic language (in fact, the very same expression
"violently in love" that Austen saw fit to fob us off with later in the novel
in the proposal scene!). Even in her more "romantic" last
novel Persuasion, she still
ruthlessly cut out Wentworth's line "Anne, my own dear Anne!" from her earlier
draft, and replaced it with less pointed narration in the final version of
the text; and she almost makes fun of her heroine Anne Elliot:
"Prettier musings of high-wrought love and eternal
constancy could never have passed along the streets of Bath, than
Anne was sporting with from Camden Place to Westgate Buildings. It was
almost enough to spread purification and perfume all the way."
And in a letter of November 8th 1796, Jane Austen wrote "I have had
a... letter from Buller; I was afraid he would oppress me with his felicity
& his love for his wife, but this is not the case; he calls her simply
Anna without any angelic embellishments".
And Jane Austen never even mentions lovers kissing (an important
moment in Emma is when
Mr. Knightley fails to kiss Emma's hand), though Willoughby does kiss a
lock of Marianne's hair in Sense and
Sensibility. And Mr. Knightly touches Emma, causing a "flutter
of pleasure" in this scene from Emma
(though they are not yet acknowledged lovers at this point).
One minor but interesting point is that, though Jane Austen never used a
Jewish character, or discussed Judaism in any way in her writings, she manages
to strike a blow against anti-Semitism anyway -- her sole mention of Jews is
the phrase "as rich as a Jew", used repetitively in
Northanger Abbey by John
Thorpe (one of the most obnoxious and ridiculous characters in all her novels);
significantly, the heroine Catherine Morland does not at first understand
what he means.
Though she always had her admirers, Jane Austen was not the most popular or
most highly-praised novelist of her era (none of her novels were reprinted in
English
between 1818 and 1831), and she was not generally considered a great novelist
until the late nineteenth century (see
Southam). During her lifetime, Sir
Walter Scott boosted Jane Austen through his review of
Emma, but nowadays it is Jane
Austen who is used to boost Sir Walter Scott -- Jane Austen's comments
(in a personal letter of
September 28th, 1814) on Scott's Waverley have
been used as a back cover blurb for recent reprintings of Scott's novel.
One thing that many contemporary readers felt to be lacking in Jane Austen's novels was
their failure to be `instructive' (i.e. to teach a moral), or `inspirational'
(that is "to elevate mankind by their depiction of ideal persons, even in
defiance of the known realities of ordinary life" --
Southam, p.14). Jane Austen makes fun of
such didactic tendencies in her ending to
Northanger Abbey: "I leave
it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this
work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny or reward filial
disobedience." In her last work
(Sanditon), she has a very
foolish character (Sir
Edward Denham) criticize novels like those she herself writes as "vapid
tissues of Ordinary occurrences from which no useful Deductions can be drawn".
Jane Austen also once said (in a letter of
March 23 1816) that "pictures of perfection make me sick and
wicked", and she satirized the frequent lack of realism in the literature of
the day in her Plan of a Novel:
"there will be no mixture... the Good will be unexceptionable in every respect
-- and there will be no foibles or weaknesses but with the Wicked, who
will be completely depraved and infamous, hardly a resemblance of Humanity
left in them". (See
also quotes from Jane Austen on the "heroic"
(i.e. falsely idealized) vs. the "natural".)
What many other contemporary readers did admire in Jane Austen's novels was
their plausibility and depiction of real life -- as opposed to the
sensationalism, unlikely meetings between long-lost relatives, villainous
aristocratic would-be ravishers, etc. that were the stock in trade of much of
the literature of the period.
Thus one Anne Romilly wrote in 1814 that
"Mansfield park...has been
pretty generally admired here, and I think all novels must be that are true to
life which this is... It has not however that elevation of virtue, something
beyond nature, that gives the greatest charm to a novel."
"In most novels you are amused for the time with a set of Ideal
People whom you never think of afterwards or whom you the least expect to meet
in common life, whereas in Miss A----'s works, & especially in
M[ansfield] P[ark] you actually
live with them, you fancy yourself one of the family; & the
scenes are so exactly descriptive, so perfectly natural, that there is
scarcely an Incident, or conversation, or a person, that you are not inclined
to imagine you have at one time or other in your Life been a witness to, borne
a part in, & been acquainted with."
In a letter of May 1813, soon after the publication of
Pride and Prejudice, Annabella
Milbanke (later Lady Byron) wrote in a letter that
"I have
finished the Novel called
Pride and Prejudice, which I think a
very superior work. It depends not on any of the common resources of novel
writers, no drownings, no conflagrations, nor runaway horses, nor lap-dogs and
parrots, nor chambermaids and milliners, nor rencontres [duels] and disguises.
I really think it is the most probable I have ever read. It is not a
crying book, but the interest is very strong, especially for
Mr. Darcy. The characters
which are not amiable are diverting, and all of them are consistently
supported."
In 1815 one William Gifford wrote
"I have for the first time
looked into P. and P.; and
it is really a very pretty thing. No dark passages; no secret chambers; no
wind-howlings in long galleries; no drops of blood upon a rusty dagger --
things that should now be left to ladies' maids and sentimental
washerwomen." (See
also Henry Tilney's gothic parody from
Northanger Abbey.)
In 1816 Sir Walter Scott reviewed
Emma, as being one of "a class
of fictions which has arisen almost in our own times, and which draws the
characters and incidents introduced more immediately from the current of
ordinary life than was permitted by the former rules of the novel", and
"copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and
presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary
world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking
place around him".
Also read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen's
very finely written novel of Pride and
Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the
involvement and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the
most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like
any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace
things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the
sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature
died so early!
The following is part of a lecture the novelist Anthony Trollope gave in
1870 (in which he also expresses the Victorian sentiment that "Throughout all
[Jane Austen's] works, a sweet lesson of homely household womanly virtue is
ever being taught.").
"Miss Austen was surely a great novelist. What she did, she did
perfectly. Her work, as far as it goes, is faultless. She wrote of the times
in which she lived, of the class of people with which she associated, and in
the language which was usual to her as an educated lady. Of romance, -- what
we generally mean when we speak of romance -- she had no tinge. Heroes and
heroines with wonderful adventures there are none in her novels. Of great
criminals and hidden crimes she tells us nothing. But she places us in a
circle of gentlemen and ladies, and charms us while she tells us with an
unconscious accuracy how men should act to women, and women act to men. It is
not that her people are all good; -- and, certainly, they are not all wise.
The faults of some are the anvils on which the virtues of others are hammered
till they are bright as steel. In the comedy of folly I know no novelist who
has beaten her. The letters of
Mr. Collins, a clergyman in
Pride and Prejudice, would
move laughter in a low-church archbishop."
Her letter of January 12th 1848 to George Lewes (in response to his advice
to her, after the publication of her novel Jane Eyre to write
less melodramatically, like Jane Austen):
``Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on
that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written
Pride and Prejudice or
Tom Jones, than any of
the Waverley novels?
I had not seen Pride and Prejudice
till I had read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did
I find? An accurate daguerrotyped [photographed] portrait of a commonplace
face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and
delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no open
country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck [stream]. I should hardly
like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined
houses. These observations will probably irritate you. but I shall run the
risk.
Now I can understand admiration of George Sand [Lucie Aurore Dupin]...she
has a grasp of mind which, if I cannot fully comprehend, I can very deeply
respect: she is sagacious and profound; Miss Austen is only shrewd and
observant.''
Letter of January 18th 1848 to George Lewes (in response to his reply to
the preceding):
``You say I must familiarise my mind with the fact that "Miss
Austen is not a poetess, has no ``sentiment''" (you scornfully enclose the
word in inverted commas), "has no eloquence, none of the ravishing enthusiasm
of poetry"; and then you add, I must "learn to acknowledge her as
one of the greatest artists, of the greatest painters of human
character, and one of the writers with the nicest sense of means to an
end that ever lived".
The last point only will I ever acknowledge. ... Miss Austen being, as you
say, without "sentiment", without poetry, maybe is sensible
(more real than true), but she cannot be
great.''
Newsflash: Research by P. H. Wheat recently (1992)
turned up the following lost paragraph to this letter, in which
Charlotte Brontë expresses her preference for Jane Austen over one
Eliza Lynn Lynton:
``With infinitely more relish can I sympathise with Miss Austen's
clear common sense and subtle shrewdness. If you find no inspiration in Miss
Austen's page, neither do you find mere windy wordiness; to use your words
over again, she exquisitely adapts her means to her end; both are very
subdued, a little contracted, but never absurd.''
Letter of April 12th 1850 to W.S. Williams:
"I have likewise read one of Miss Austen's works,
Emma -- read it with interest
and with just the degree of admiration which Miss Austen herself would have
thought sensible and suitable -- anything like warmth or enthusiasm, anything
energetic, poignant, or heartfelt, is utterly out of place in commending these
works: all such demonstrations the authoress would have met with a well bred
sneer, would have calmly scorned as outré and extravagant. She does
her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people
curiously well; there is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the
painting: she ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing
profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her;
she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood; even to
the Feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant
recognition; too frequent converse with them would ruffle the smooth elegance
of her progress."
"I... do not think the worse of him for having a brain so very
different from mine. ... And he deserves better treatment than to be obliged
to read any more of my works."
-- Jane Austen, letter of March 23 1817
"Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that
one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that
hadn't a book in it."
-- Following the Equator
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
"I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at
so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic
invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society,
without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and
narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she)
the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable."
Cardinal Newman (1837):
"Miss Austen has no romance... What vile creatures her parsons
are!"