Quotes from Jane Aiken Hodge

No, sir.' She withdrew her hand. 'Quoting Shakespeare will get you nowhere.

That's the whole point of bread and circuses; they give employment to the vulgar.

Fortitude was always to be one of the great virtues for Jane Austen.

Man must work, she might well have said, and woman must not weep.

V. S. Pritchett has a challenging aside in which he describes Jane Austen as a war novelist, pointing out that the facts of the long war are basic to all her books.

There is something very significant about Jane Austen's own reservation in her letter about the Evangelicals. She was "at least persuaded that they who are so from reason and feeling, must be happiest and safest". It leaves one wondering just what her own reason and feeling were telling her. We have no idea. In this passage, she sounds curiously like someone of our own times saying how much they would like to believe in God, if only they could.

Jane Austen mastered her unscrupulous charmers before she did her heroes.

Her description of her method of work has been quoted over and over again by her critics, and I suppose it is no more ironic that this serious bit of self-depreciation should be taken au pied de la lettre than that her comic ones were.

Jane Austen's books are always, to some extent, concerned with the problem of learning by painful experience

I think, for one's single book, one would be wise to choose Mansfield Park or Emma rather even than Pride and Prejudice. "Wisdom is better than wit," as Jane Austen told Fanny, "and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side." People who begin by loving Pride and Prejudice, may end by rereading the later novels more often.

Of all writers, [Jane Austen] is the most adept at creating both characters who seem to possess an independent existence and a narrator to whom readers feel able to turn, as if to an intimate friend.

Among siblings, deep affection and aggravation generally go hand in hand.

Everything Jane Austen read came alive, but, at the same time, her natural empathy with those she encountered through her reading was kept in check by a keen sense of the ridiculous and of the potential absurdity of emotional display.

Jane Austen] knew that it was better to remain a spinster, with a limited income and no permanent home, than to marry without the deepest emotional attachment.

As her writing developed, Jane Austen recognised that there were different ways of creating original works of art and that the skills acquired from experience and experimentation were ultimately as important as the initial sparks of inspiration.