75 Quotes About Austen

Especially for upwardly mobile young females, declaring one's enthusiasm for Austen (whose heroines almost always move up in social and economic status as a result of the sterling marital alliances they form) has been a classic means of indicating one's purported good taste, good breeding, and good sense: I am an especially adorable member of the ruling class.

I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.

There were, of course, compensatory advantages to growing older. ‘As I must leave off being young,’ Jane admitted, ‘I find many Douceurs … I am put on the Sofa near the Fire & can drink as much wine as I like.

She ventured to hope he did not always read only poetry; and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.

Like Wollstonecraft, Austen rejects the notion that ‘man was made to reason, woman to feel.’ Perhaps Austen was tired of reading passages in conduct books suggesting that young women were innately sensitive, quivering, emotional messes.

Austen suggests that a gentleman is made, not born - and made only through a process of painful self-reflection and discovery.

People who say Jane or talk about Janeites revolt me. The sort that can walk with kings and not lose that common touch. 'Miss Austen to you' is what I feel inclined to say.

It's a truth universally acknowledged...

...and I decide to stop inwardly composing the feminist world court's prosecutorial summation to the jury.