The answer to this question is…a lot. They love her or they hate her, but, either way, they can’t stop talking about her. (And, as Oscar Wilde said, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”) Here’s a look at what authors past and present have said about Jane Austen.
J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series
“Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.”
“My favorite writer is Jane Austen, and I’ve read all her books so many times I’ve lost count … I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen. Being able to sit at home at the parsonage and your books would be very famous and occasionally you would correspond with the Prince of Wales’s secretary.”
Mark Twain, author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
“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.”
“Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book
“Jane lies in Winchester—blessed be her shade!
Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made.
And while the stones of Winchester, or Milsom Street, remain,
Glory, love and honour unto England’s Jane!”
Stephen King, author of The Shining
“I don’t have much interest in ‘relationship’ novels or romance. I’ve never read Jane Austen. I do not say this with either pride or shame (or prejudice, for that matter). It’s just a fact.”
Virginia Woolf, author of A Room of One’s Own
(Woolf had a lot to say about Austen. Are you ready?)
“Anyone who has had the temerity to write about Jane Austen knows that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.”
“The people who talk of her as if she were a niminy piminy spinster always annoy me.”
“What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë. It is another feather, perhaps the finest, in their caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue—write this, think that. They alone were deaf to that persistent voice, now grumbling, now patronising, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone, but must be at them.”
And one more because it’s a famous one:
“Here is Jane Austen, a great writer as we all agree, but, for my own part, I would rather not find myself alone in the room with her.”
(For more of Woolf’s thoughts on Austen, see Always Austen author Collins Hemingway’s post.)
Charlotte Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights
“Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point…I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.”
“Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete, and rather insensible (not senseless) woman; if this is heresy- I cannot help it.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, author of “Self-Reliance”
“I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seems 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 so narrow…All that interests any character introduced is still this one, has he or she money to marry with?…Suicide is more respectable.”
John Marshall, fourth Chief Justice of the U.S., author of Marbury v. Madison (a bit of a stretch to put him on this author list, but the end of this quote is golden)
“I was a little mortified, however, to find that you had not admitted the name of Miss Austen into your list of favorites…Her flights are not lofty, she does not soar on eagle’s wings, but she is pleasing, interesting, equable, and yet amusing. I count on your making some apology for this omission.”
Sir Walter Scott, author of Ivanhoe
“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 involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with…What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!”
Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita
“At first sight, Jane Austen’s manner and matter may seem to be old-fashioned, stilted, unreal. But this is a delusion to which the bad reader succumbs.”
Ezra Pound, author of The Cantos
“No one expects Jane Austen to be as interesting as Stendhal. A book about a dull, stupid, hemmed-in sort of life, by a person who has never lived it, will never be as interesting as the work of some author who has comprehended many men’s manners and seen many grades and conditions of existence.”
But then he also said this:
“I am inclined to say in desperation, read it yourself and kick out every sentence that isn’t as Jane Austen would have written it in prose. Which is, I admit, impossible. But when you do get a limpid line in perfectly straight normal order, isn’t it worth any other ten?”
Edith Wharton, author of The Age of Innocence
“Jane Austen, of course, wise in her neatness, trim in her sedateness; she never fails, but there are few or none like her.”
Edmund Wilson, literary critic and author of Axel’s Castle
“There have been several revolutions of taste during the last century and a quarter of English literature, and through them all perhaps only two reputations have never been affected by the shifts of fashion: Shakespeare’s and Jane Austen’s… She has compelled the amazed admiration of writers of the most diverse kinds.”
Arnold Bennett, author of The Old Wives’ Tale
“I like Jane. I have read several Janes. . . . She was a great little novelist. . . . But her world is a tiny one. . . . She did not know enough of the world to be a great novelist. She had not the ambition to be a great novelist. She knew her place.”
(Who was Arnold Bennett?? I love the irony here.)
And, of course, Jane ought to get the last word…
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
And one more:
“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”
Feel free to comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
I used this site and this site when researching quotes and this one on Woolf’s writings on Austen.
More Austen:
Murder, Theft, and Guillotines: The Colorful Lives of Jane’s Family & How They Influenced Her Novels
Is Mr. Collins Really That Bad?
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