‘Read again, for the third time at least, Miss Austen's 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. 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!’
Sir Walter Scott, taken from his diary for March 14, 1826

‘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.’
Anthony Trollope

‘Miss Austen has no romance!... What vile creatures her parsons are.’
Cardinal Newman, 10th Jan 1837

‘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.’
Ralph Waldo Emerson

‘The most perfect artist among women.’
Virginia Woolf

‘Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would have rather written Pride and Prejudice, or Tom Jones, than any of the Waverley Novels? I had not seen Pride and Prejudice till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate, daguerreotyped 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. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.’
Charlotte Bronte, 1848, letter to G. H. Lewes

‘I will not say that your mulberry-trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive.'
Jane Austen, Letter to Cassandra, 31st May 1811

‘Poor Mr Hollis! It was impossible not to feel him hardly used: to be obliged to stand back in his own house and see the best place by the fire constantly occupied by Sir Henry Denham.’
The last line of Sanditon, Jane Austen's last and unfinished novel
(and thus the last line she wrote)

‘I am put on the sofa near the fire and can drink as much wine as I like.’
Jane Austen, to her sister Cassandra, on the joys of being old
and respectable, 6th November 1813

‘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 - and I hope you will write a great deal more, and make full use of them while they are so very favourably arranged.’
Jane Austen, to her niece Anna, 1814

‘I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.’
Jane Austen, to her sister Cassandra, Christmas Eve 1798