"Austen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... aspirant to give his days and nights to the study of Addison; and the Spectator was the most indispensable set of volumes upon the shelves of every library where the young ladies described by Miss Burney and Miss Austen were permitted to indulge a growing taste for literature. I fear that young people of the present day discover, if they try the experiment, that their curiosity is easily satisfied. This singular ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... getting on, Austen," he answered, "thanks! I am getting on. I will sit in that easy-chair for a few minutes. Thanks! Then we will have ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... * * * The charm of the story is in its naturalness. It is perfectly quiet, domestic, and truthful. In the calm force and homely realities of its scenes it reminds us of Miss Austen."—Times. ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... of course, was a commonplace notion in the 1820s, except that Cooper's heroine, misled by circumstances, comes to believe that her romantic fantasies are happening. This Don Quixote-like twist is less common, though Jane Austen's famous "Northanger Abbey" and Eaton Stannard Barrett's little-known but very funny "The Heroine; or, Adventures of Cherubina" (1813) fall within the genre. "Heart", a slim (indeed, truncated) ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... is better for me, and this fact is not altered by the other fact that my own shortcomings are to blame in the matter. I still read a number of Scott's novels over and over again, whereas if I finish anything by Miss Austen I have a feeling that duty performed is a rainbow to the soul. But other booklovers who are very close kin to me, and whose taste I know to be better than mine, read Miss Austen all the time—and, moreover, they are very kind, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... entertaining. I do not remember being so much pleased with it at first. There is a want of story, always fatal to a book the first reading—and it is well if it gets a chance of a second. Alas! poor novel! 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 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, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... I have ever heard urged against Mrs. Wharton's fine art of narrative is that it is narrow—an art of dress suit and sophistication. And this book is the answer. For, of course, her art is narrow—like Jane Austen's, like Sheridan's, like Pope's, like Maupassant's, like that of all writers who prefer to study human nature in its most articulate instead of its broadest manifestations. It is narrow because it is focussed, but this does not mean that it is small. Although the story of "The Age of Innocence" ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... With all the humour and charm there is in Plato, we cannot escape his tremendous teaching on the age-long consequences of good and evil in a cosmos ordered by God. Carlyle, in our own days, realized the same thing—he learnt it no doubt from his mother; and learnt it again in London. In Mrs. Austen's drawing-room, with "Sidney Smith guffawing," and "other people prating, jargoning, to me through these thin cobwebs Death and Eternity sate glaring." "How will this look in the Universe," he asks, ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... her little salon and looked at the volumes scattered about there, some books of devotion, travel, books on sport, Rossetti's and Newman's poems, some French novels, and the novels of Jane Austen, of which, oddly, considering her nature, she was very fond. For the first time in her life they struck her as shrivelled, petty chronicles of shrivelled, bloodless, artificial lives. She turned back into her bedroom, took up the little white volume of the Imitation, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... The Malay Archipelago is about the size of Europe from the North Cape to the Mediterranean, and from Britain to Russia; and therefore equals all the geological formations which have been examined with any accuracy, excepting those of the United States of America. I fully agree with Mr. Godwin-Austen, that the present condition of the Malay Archipelago, with its numerous large islands separated by wide and shallow seas, probably represents the former state of Europe, while most of our formations were accumulating. The Malay Archipelago is one of the richest regions in organic beings; ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... discharge of goody-goody puerilities and dreary moralities; a book which is full of pathos which revolts, and humor which grieves the heart. There are few things in literature that are more piteous, more pathetic, than the celebrated "humorous" incident of Moses and the spectacles. 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... others have shown us since, that they may very easily be made. Professional matters, the lower middle classes, etc., were thought 'low,' as Goldsmith's audience had had it, 'vulgar,' as Madame de Stael said of Miss Austen. That the farrago of the novelist's book is absolutely universal and indiscriminate, provided only that he knows what to do with it, had not dawned on the general mind. On the other hand, Lady Louisa ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... could see that his eyes were filled with tears. Nearly thirty years later there was a similar scene in the House, in which Mr. Gladstone was again the moving cause. This was when, referring to a speech by Mr. Austen Chamberlain, he spoke of it in terms that made Mr. Chamberlain himself flush with emotion, and caused the tears to gather in the eyes of that hardened political fighter. Strange are the links which bind ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... Jane Austen's delicate and ironic art will remain unassailable through all changes of taste and varieties of opinion. What she really possesses—what might be called the clue to her inimitable secret—is nothing less than the power of giving expression to that undying ironic detachment, touched ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... greatest work is The Task; and the best poem in it is probably "The Winter Evening." His best-known poem is John Gilpin, which, like "The Task," he wrote at the request of his friend, Lady Austen. His most powerful poem is The Castaway. He always writes in clear, crisp, pleasant, and manly English. He himself says, in a letter to a friend: "Perspicuity is always more than half the battle... A meaning that does not stare you in the face is as bad as no meaning;" ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... Novel? If you ever mean to do so hereafter, let it be Miss Martineau's Deerbrook. It is really very striking; and parts of it are very true and very beautiful. It is not so true, or so thoroughly clear and harmonious, among delineations of English middle-class gentility, as Miss Austen's books, especially as Pride and Prejudice, which I think exquisite; but it is worth reading. The hour and the Man is eloquent, but an absurd exaggeration.—I hold out so valorously against this Scandinavian weather, that I deserve to be ranked with Odin and Thor; ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... Miss Austen gives us just such a picture of domestic life as Asmodeus would present could he remove the roof of many an English ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... I could write a novel in which, as mostly in life, thank goodness, nothing happens. Jane Austen, it has been objected, forestalled me there, and it is true that she very nearly did—but not quite. It was a point for her art to make that the novel should have form. Form involved plot, plot a logic of events; ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... added another to the not inconsiderable roll of eminent men who have found their delight in Miss Austen.... His little book upon her, just published by Walter Scott, is certainly a fascinating book to those who already know her and love her well; and we have little doubt that it will prove also a fascinating book to those who have still ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... and of a Post-pliocene fauna in Great Britain is on the coast of the county of Sussex, about 25 miles west of Brighton, and 15 south of Chichester. A marine deposit exposed between high and low tide occurs on both sides of the promontory called Selsea Bill, in which Mr. Godwin-Austen found thirty-eight species of shells, and the number has ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... the herald. "And on the day of her flight, and that was on Saint Austen's Eve, I saw Varney's groom, attired in his liveries, hold his master's horse and Mistress Amy's palfrey, bridled and saddled PROPER, behind ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... of Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen appeared in the early part of the nineteenth century. Maria Edgeworth's novel, Castle Rackrent, was published in 1800, and rapidly followed by other tales descriptive of Irish life; four of Jane Austen's novels, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... agitation, she constructs sentences so ponderous and intricate that Mr. Burke's periods are trifles in comparison. And we know all this, simply because there are certain things to be done, and only so many people to do them. Miss Austen, indeed, could keep her secrets impenetrable; but the art died with her, and our common sense is daily insulted by these weak attempts at mystery. If the secret is one that cannot be kept, why, let the author tell it us at once, and we can ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... we first came across Borough Farm. We left it in 1889. I did a great deal of work, there and in London, in those seven years. The Macmillan papers I have already spoken of. They were on many subjects—Tennyson's "Becket," Mr. Pater's "Marius," "The Literature of Introspection," Jane Austen, Keats, Gustavo Becquer, and various others. I still kept up my Spanish to some extent, and I twice examined—in 1882 and 1888—for the Taylorian scholarship in Spanish at Oxford, our old friend, Doctor Kitchin, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Towards the end of the century, on the other hand, there were many churches where kneeling was sufficiently uncommon as almost to call special attention. Thus Admiral Austen was remarked upon as 'the officer who kneeled at church' (Jane Austen's Memoirs, 23); and C. Simeon writes in his Diary, '1780, March 8. Kneeled down before service; nor do I see any impropriety in it. Why should I be afraid ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... have their favourite bed-books. Thackeray has charmingly told us of his. Of the few novels that can really be enjoyed when the reader is settling down for slumber almost all have been set forth by writers who—consciously or unconsciously—have placed character before plot; Thackeray himself, Miss Austen, Borrow, Marryat, ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... time of Miss Austen's novels back again," said young Bayle, stooping to her, with his measured and agreeable smile—"before even the ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... It is an oblong sheet of glass, set in a frame of dark, highly varnished wood, carved in the worst taste of the Regency period, and relieved with faded gilt. Glancing at it from a distance, you would guess the thing a relic from some "genteel" drawing-room of Miss Austen's time. But go nearer and look into the glass itself. By some malformation or mere freak of make, all the images it throws back are livid. Flood the room with sunshine; stand before this glass with youth and ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Teddy's disappearance she had seen the good man coming towards her, always with a manifest decision, always with the same faltering doubt as now. Often in their happy days had she and Teddy discussed him and derided him and rejoiced over him. They had agreed he was as good as Jane Austen's Mr. Collins. He really was very like Mr. Collins, except that he was plumper. And now, it was as if he was transparent to her hard defensive scrutiny. She knew he was impelled by his tradition, by his ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... I believe by Sir ALFRED MOND. If the campaign has not met with the success which it deserves, the cause is probably to be found in the slightly unfortunate title whose assonance suggests to the public mind the "House of Bondage" in the Psalms. It would have been better, I think, to adopt Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN'S suggestion, which was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... manuscript of a novel which she had written, entitled "Moderation," and which was dedicated "To him to whom I owe all that in me is of worth,—Charles Liversage Spence." It was an attempt, as she explained to me, to return to the rational style and improving tone of Jane Austen, whose novels were sound educators as well as sources of amusement. From Miss Kingsley's natural fluency and sprightliness I expected something "racy," to quote Paul Barr, and I was disappointed to find "Moderation" dull and didactic. It was ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... have had delightful Comic writers. Besides Fielding and Goldsmith, there is Miss Austen, whose Emma and Mr. Elton might walk straight into a comedy, were the plot arranged for them. Galt's neglected novels have some characters and strokes of shrewd comedy. In our poetic literature the comic is delicate and graceful ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... distinguish one tune from another; did not care for pictures nor for garden flowers; could see nothing in Dante's poetry nor in Shelley's, nor in Hawthorne's romances, nor in the novels of Dickens and Jane Austen. Edgar Poe was to him "the jingle man." Poe, ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... have done so; so many that we English novelists may boast as a class that has been the general result of our own work. Looking back to the past generation, I may say with certainty that such was the operation of the novels of Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Walter Scott. Coming down to my own times, I find such to have been the teaching of Thackeray, of Dickens, and of George Eliot. Speaking, as I shall speak to any who may read these words, with that absence of self-personality which the dead may ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... in east; mountains in north and northwest; Balochistan plateau in west lowest point: Indian Ocean 0 m highest point: K2 (Mt. Godwin-Austen) ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... manufacturers met at the Treasury to consider best way of grappling with unprecedented financial situation created by events of past fortnight. Happy thought to include in invitation his predecessor at the Treasury. In accordance with patriotic spirit obliterating party animosity, SON AUSTEN promptly accepted invitation. Gives valuable assistance to LLOYD GEORGE in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... title. The manuscript was revised around 1803 and sold to a London publisher, Crosbie & Co., who sold it back in 1816. The Signet Classic text is based on the first edition, published by John Murray, London, in 1818—the year following Miss Austen's death. Spelling and punctuation have been largely brought into conformity ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... carried the day after all, as they generally do with men of true taste. "Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone," says that nice observer of human nature, Jane Austen. "Man only knows man's insensibility to a new gown." We hope, however, that the dressmakers and tirewomen of the fair Sybilla, who had expended so much time and invention, were handsomely rewarded by the Prince, since they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... were the originators of the romantic school. History has not yet discovered the first realist or the first romanticist. Both schools have from time to time been needed to hold each other in check. Howells makes no claim to being considered the first realist. He distinctly says that Jane Austen (1775-1817) had treated material with entire truthfulness. Henry James might have discovered that Fielding had preceded him in writing, "It is our business to discharge the part of a faithful historian, and to describe human ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... exciting and romantic, or even that are silly, but I do say, sandwich them. Face the fact that a silly or passionate novel is likely to have great power over you at this stage, and therefore read very few of them, and read many of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Miss Austen, ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... writer on moral or political theory that can be mentioned, without seeming comic, in the same breath with the great female novelists. But when we come to the novelists, the women have, on the whole, equality; and certainly, in some points, superiority. Jane Austen is as strong in her own way as Scott is in his. But she is, for all practical purposes, never weak in her own way—and Scott very often is. Charlotte Bronte dedicated Jane Eyre to the author of Vanity Fair. ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... Alecto, Commander FW Austen, had previously, early in April, gone up, towing three heavily-laden schooners against a current of three knots and a head wind. On approaching a place called Tonelero, a number of workmen were seen throwing up batteries, clearly for the purpose of annoying the convoy on their way down. ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... investigation of the actual facts of life, George Eliot in a philosophic contemplation of its underlying truths, and Gabriele D'Annunzio in an artistic presentation of the dream-world that he imagines. Washington Irving is mainly an artist, Tolstoi mainly a philosopher, and Jane Austen mainly a scientifically accurate observer. Few are the writers, even among the greatest masters of the art, of whom we feel, as we feel of Hawthorne, that the scientist, the philosopher, and the artist reign over equal precincts of their minds. Hawthorne the ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... between realism and romance, which went on in the days of Cervantes, as it does in the days of Zola and Howells, had its skirmished also in Mrs. Radcliffe's time. Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey," written in 1803 but published only in 1817, is gently satirical of Gothic fiction. The heroine is devoted to the "Mysteries of Udolpho," which she discusses with her bosom friend. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... woman, deer, eagle, princess, elephant, man, witness, prince, fox, farmer, countess, mouth, horse, day, year, lion, wolf, thief, Englishman. 2. Write the possessive case of: James, Dickens, his sister Mary, Miss Austen, the Prince of Wales, Frederick the Great, Harper and Brothers, father-in-law, Charles, Jones, William the Conqueror, Henry the Eighth, man-of-war, ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... amusing?" she said. "Well" (complacently), "we have our points. As Jane Austen wrote of the Misses Bingley, 'Our powers of conversation are considerable—we can describe an entertainment with accuracy, relate an anecdote with humour, and laugh ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... at this time of day is an idle task. After being overshadowed for a little, it has taken its place finally among the masterpieces of English fiction, along with Jane Austen and the Vicar of Wakefield. There has never been a more delightful and tender study of English village life, or one in which insight is so ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... 30th.—Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN, returning to the Exchequer after an interval of thirteen years, made a much better Budget speech than one would have expected. It was longer, perhaps, than was absolutely necessary. Like the late Mr. GLADSTONE, he has a tendency to digress into financial ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... disappeared, and though he was afterwards discharged from His Majesty's ship Utrecht on the score of his holding a Sea-Fencible's ticket, the remedy had worked its cure and the Harbour-Master was thenceforth free to marry his daughter where he would. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1450—Capt. Austen, 23 Sept. 1803.] ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... JANE AUSTEN, has been received with more favour than I had ventured to expect. The notices taken of it in the periodical press, as well as letters addressed to me by many with whom I am not personally acquainted, show that an unabated interest is still taken in every ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... power in Great Britain early in November, 1924, Mr. Austen Chamberlain becoming Foreign Secretary. At the request of the British Government, the agenda items for the December, 1924 meeting of the Council at Rome relating to the Protocol of Geneva were postponed until the March meeting. In the meantime, the British Government has suggested ...
— The Geneva Protocol • David Hunter Miller
... necessary element in their bronze; and they seem also to have found a market in Assyria for their own most valuable and artistic bronzes, the exquisite embossed paterae which are among the most precious of the treasures brought by Sir Austen Layard ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... the north-west near the Muztagh pass in a group of majestic peaks including K 2 or Mount Godwin Austen (28,265 feet), Gasherbrum, and Masherbrum, which tower over and feed the vast Boltoro glacier. The first of these giants is the second largest mountain in the world. The Duke of the Abruzzi ascended it to the height ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... as a young man, being greatly struck by the independence of character exhibited by Miss Bronte in a certain confession she made in respect to Miss Austen's novels. It was at a period when everybody professed to adore them, and especially the great-guns of literature. Walter Scott thought more highly of the genius of the author of 'Mansfield Park' even than of ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... commonplace Briton roar himself purple with impassioned platitude at a political meeting; but I perceive that all my neighbours take him with the utmost seriousness. Again, your literary journalist professes to wriggle in his chair over the humour of Jane Austen; to me she is the dullest lady that ever faithfully photographed the trivial. Years ago I happened to be crossing Putney Bridge, in a frock-coat and silk hat, when a passing member of the proletariat dug his elbows in his comrade's ribs and, quoting a music-hall tag of the period, shouted "He's ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... neither equal nor second. But among the writers who, in the point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries and among the women whom all the world remembers. They, one and all, can only move in dreamland now. Their lives are but stories in a printed book, and a heroine of Jane Austen's is as real as Stella or the fair Walpole. So I apologise for nothing. I have dreamed. I may hope that others ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... of us, indeed, became skilful bricklayers; and on a pleasant afternoon you might see Alice and Bertha, and George and me, all laying brick together,— Polly sitting in the shade of some wall which had been built high enough, and reading to us from Jean Ingelow or Monte-Cristo or Jane Austen, while little Clara brought to us our mortar. Happily and lightly went by that summer. Haliburton and his wife made us a visit; Ben Brannan brought up his wife and children; Mrs. Haliburton herself ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... building is not recorded. She was burned at Conjocketa Creek, near Black Rock. The next was the Ohio, of sixty tons, built by Murray and Bixby, in 1810, and launched from the East bank of the river near the spot now occupied by Pettit & Holland's warehouse. She was sailed by John Austen and afterwards became a gunboat in Perry's fleet, but took no part in the battle of Lake Erie, ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... have read Vicar of Wakefield and some of Jane Austen—thoroughly artificial. Have begun Children of the Abbey. It begins with this ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the appearance of Scott's novels the department of prose writing had undergone an elevating process in the hands of Godwin, Miss Austen, Miss Porter, and Miss Edgeworth. "Waverley" appeared in 1814, and the series which followed with surprising rapidity obtained universal and unexampled popularity. The Waverley Novels are not merely love stories, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... may come when he may be able to spend but little of his time at his Highbury home, but he has children who will keep the house inhabited and well aired if he himself does not. His eldest son, Mr. Austen Chamberlain, M.P. for one of the Worcestershire divisions, is in training to walk in his father's footsteps, and to see eye to eye—or I might say eye-glass to eye-glass—with him in matters political. What the future ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... red and yellow and other crude colors into a country where every one had previously dressed in drab—a great relief, but not art. This is hard measure, however: some of her character-drawing is almost as richly humorous and valid as Jane Austen's own. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... than the king of Spaines stile. I thought these Cymesses like the Cimbrians had bene some strange nation hee had brought vnder, & they were no more but things like sheepelice, which aliue haue the venomost sting that may be, and being dead do stinke out of measure. Saint Austen compareth heretiques vnto them. The chiefest thing that my eyes delighted in, was the church of the 7. Sibels, which is a most miraculous thing. All their prophesies and oracles being there enroulde, as also the beginning and ending of their whole catalogue of the heathen ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... book like that is my only desire on earth," she murmurs, as she reaches for a volume of Jane Austen. ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various
... "Jovial Huntsmen;" or sketched that inimitably complacent dog in the "House that Jack Built;" or exhibited the exploits of the immortal "train- band captain" of "famous London town." This last is his masterpiece. Cowper himself must have rejoiced at it,—and Lady Austen. There are two sketches in this book—they occupy the concluding pages—which are especially fascinating. On one, John Gilpin, in a forlorn and flaccid condition, is helped into the house by the sympathising (and very attractive) Betty; on the other he has ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... special charm lies in its happy phrasing of acute observations of life. For the delicacy with which his personalities reveal themselves through their own letters, "the book might be favorably compared," says the Chicago Tribune, "with much of Jane Austen's character work"—and the critic proceeds to justify, by quotations, what he admits ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... partition of Ireland would be," he said, "an outrage upon nature and upon history." He quoted a phrase used by Mr. Austen Chamberlain, who had described it as "the statutory negation of Ireland's national claim." But, he argued, no such sacrifice of principle had been made. The demand of Nationalists was for a Parliament for the whole of Ireland, having power to ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... the portrait of a man particularly successful in his love affairs. It does not certainly read like a description of the hero of a novel written by The Duchess or even by Miss Jane Austen. Yet this is the picture of a man plentifully beloved, large-minded but strangely naif; a revolutionist ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... Austen, daughter of the rector of Steventon, in North Hampshire, England, was born there on December 16, 1775, and received her education from her father, a former Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford. Her life was spent in the country or in country towns, chiefly ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... my nerves. Well. I don't want luxury. What I want is leisure. I want to do the things I've wanted to do for forty years, and couldn't. I want, if I feel like it, to start to learn French and read Jane Austen and stay in bed till noon. I never could stay in bed till noon, and I know I can't learn now, but I'm going to do it once, if it kills me. I'm too old to bring up a second crop of children, I want to play. It's terrible to realize that you don't learn how to live until you're ready to die; ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... involved in the career of Emma, she says, "Oh, for that gift of the gods Jane Austen had! Her speech—a rippling stream of perfect and delicious English, the King's English indeed! Each phrase is as delicately constructed as a watch, and all her watches ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various
... their friends on the Conservative side begin to ask a few questions. One would have thought at least that matters of such gravity and such novelty should be considered fairly on their merits. But what does Mr. Austen Chamberlain say? He tells us that no hesitation will be tolerated from Unionist Members of Parliament in regard to any tariff reform proposals which may in a future Parliament be submitted—by whoever may be the Chancellor of the Exchequer. No hesitation will be tolerated. Not opposition, ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... out-of-the-way places. But some god was on his side. For at his approach the bibliographical desert blossomed like the rose. He used to hunt books in Texas at one period in his life; and out of Texas would he come, bringing, so it is said, first editions of George Borrow and Jane Austen. It was maddening to be with him at such times, especially if one had a gift ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... least in the arts, and in letters, except in rare cases of genius. A new Jeanne d'Arc, the most signal example of absolute genius in history, will not come again; and the ages have waited vainly for a new Sappho or a new Jane Austen. Literature, poetry, painting, have always been fields open to woman. But two names exhaust the roll of women of the highest rank in letters—Sappho and Jane Austen. And "when did woman ever yet invent?" In "arts of government" Elizabeth had courage, and just ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... Her British Majesty's line-of-battle ship Hastings, bearing the flag of Admiral Austen, and a number of merchantmen of all nations. One, which lay near us, with the Peruvian flag at her gaff, had painted upon her stern, "Iowa, of San Francisco," and I overheard a conversation between two of the men, on the subject of the apparent anomaly. A forecastleman, addressing a petty officer, ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... afterwards did to their country: he played the difficult part of Regent and the not very easy one of King by no means ill; he was, by common and even reluctant consent, an extremely pleasant host and companion; and he liked Jane Austen's novels. There have been a good many princes—and a good many demagogues too—of whom as much good could ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... have attained a place beside the best of them. They were a novelty when they appeared. English prose fiction had somewhat declined since the time of Fielding and Goldsmith. There were truthful, though rather tame, delineations of provincial life, like Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, 1811, and {248} Pride and Prejudice, 1813; or Maria Edgeworth's Popular Tales, 1804. On the other hand, there were Gothic romances, like the Monk of Matthew Gregory Lewis, to whose Tales of Wonder some of Scott's translations from the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... though this would have meant the cancelling of all Mr. Chamberlain's public engagements at that most critical moment in politics. But Sir Charles instead went down to Highbury, where he passed his days much in the open air, playing lawn tennis and riding with his host's son, Mr Austen Chamberlain. ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... the birds, but slices of bread and marmalade to the more indigent spectators. We shall also try to get two or three open squash racket courts in Whitehall, so that on hot summer days the most carping critic who watches a rally between Mr. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN and the SECRETARY OF STATE for WAR will have to admit that we are doing our utmost to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... "Yellowplush Papers" this very year. Another newcomer in the field of romance was the Irish novelist, Charles Gaines Lever, whose early "Adventures of Harry Lorrequer" found instant favor. Among the women writers were Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, and Elizabeth Barrett. Great strides were also made in science. Shortly after the appearance of Whewell's "History of Inductive Sciences," the Ornithological and Electrical Societies were founded at London. The principle of working clocks by electricity ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... class are Madame de Sevigne, Madame de Stael, and (Bobus Smith said) Sappho, but of her not above forty lines are extant: these, however, are unrivalled; Mrs Somerville is very great in the exact sciences. Lady Holland would not hear of Madame de Stael. They agreed as to Miss Austen that her novels are excellent. Quintus Curtius is confirmed by Burnes' travels in Bokhara, but was reckoned no authority by the greatest scholars; Lord Melbourne said Mitford had expressed his confidence in him. Of the early English kings there is no reason to believe that any king ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... against the publication of all reports of sexual crimes and misdemeanors. And having extended our imagination so far we may presume as the sequence a world of such highly developed moral susceptibilities that Miss Austen's novels are beginning to cause uneasiness. Miss Austen's novels are still permitted, but in current literature nothing is said that would lead the reader to suppose that men and women are not of the same sex. But men and women still continue to meet and hold conversation. Only some advanced ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... of five minutes brought Garnet to the sleepy little town. He passed through the narrow street, and turned on to the beach, walking in the direction of the cob, that combination of pier and breakwater which the misadventures of one of Jane Austen's young misses have made known to the ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... upon the question of its making and explored it to some purpose. In all our talk about novels we are hampered and held up by our unfamiliarity with what is called their technical aspect, and that is consequently the aspect to confront. That Jane Austen was an acute observer, that Dickens was a great humourist, that George Eliot had a deep knowledge of provincial character, that our living romancers are so full of life that they are neither to ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... master realist if you forget his old-fashioned operatic scenery and costumes. It is to Jane Austen we must go for the realism admired of Mr. Howells, and justly. Her work is all of a piece. The Russians are realists, but with a difference; and that deviation forms the school. Taking Gogol as the norm of modern Russian ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Jane Austen's raillery in Northanger Abbey; Barrett's mockery in The Heroine; Peacock's Nightmare Abbey; his praise of C.B. Brown in Gryll Grange; The Mystery of the Abbey, and its misleading title; Crabbe's satire in Belinda Waters and The Preceptor ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... with politeness by everybody; with more or less concealed terror by the best people, who found her rhapsodies and her political dissertations equally boring. Here too she was unlucky enough to express the opinion that Miss Austen's books were vulgar. The fall of Napoleon brought her back to Paris; and after the vicissitudes of 1814-15, enabled her to establish herself there for the short remainder of her life, with the interruption only of visits to Coppet and to Italy. She died on the 13th ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... themselves. If the parsonage and its appurtenances can in any sense be called modern, they represented ideas and conditions which are far enough away now. There was nothing about them more modern than the early days of Miss Austen. The dining-room sideboard, with its long row of knife boxes, whose sloping lids when lifted showed a glimmering of silver handles, would have seemed familiar to Mr. Knightly, Mr. Woodhouse, and Sir Thomas Bertram. ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... read aloud, lifting a small tome more daintily printed than the rest. "Lord Byron. What's this? Jane Austen, a novel. 'Roderick, last of the Goths.' Dear, dear," his smile fading into blankness; "tiresome man, I never gave him ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... Elizabethans. His slippers were incredibly shabby, like boats burnt to the water's rim. Then there were photographs from the Greeks, and a mezzotint from Sir Joshua—all very English. The works of Jane Austen, too, in deference, perhaps, to some one else's standard. Carlyle was a prize. There were books upon the Italian painters of the Renaissance, a Manual of the Diseases of the Horse, and all the usual text-books. Listless is the air in an empty ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... toward scientific interest is represented by the following extracts from a letter from an oriental official to a western inquirer, printed by Sir Austen Henry Layard: ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... reader, and in her letters (written off with surprising rapidity) she does not often say much about the books she was so fond of discussing in talk. Among novelists, Sir Walter Scott was perhaps the one she read most often; Jane Austen too was a favourite; but she also much enjoyed many of the later novelists, especially Charles Dickens and ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... your intention, Mr. Balch"—the language was that of Jane Austen, whom she had just been reading—"but I cannot allow it to go on. In fact," she hastened to add, for he showed signs of going on, "I shall have to ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... boy. To right and left were pretty miniatures in golden frames of the Prophet's delightfully numerous grandmothers. Here might be seen Mrs. Prothero, the great ship-builder's faithful wife, in blue brocade, and Lady Camptown, who reigned at Bath, in grey tabinet and diamond buckles, when Miss Jane Austen was writing her first romance; Mrs. Susan Burlington, who knew Lord Byron—a remarkable fact—and Lady Sophia Green, who knew her own mind, a fact still more remarkable. The last-named lady wore black with a Roman nose, and the ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... course they had. Genevieve convulsed them by a dramatic representation of a stormy scene between herself and Madame Philippe; then Miss Evans's new evening frock, Miss Marlowe's incomprehensible taste in preferring Jane Austen to Dickens, Miss Langton's terrifying sarcasm, Miss Ashwell's sweet new sweater coat, all were discussed with an enormous ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... learned under the instruction of some woman who has herself only learned it from a book. Authoresses, indeed, have not unfrequently betrayed the key to some of their sex's secrets. Were it not for Northanger Abbey and Miss Austen, some of the old mysteries of girlish friendship would have remained untold, and we should never have known or understood the curiosity which may lurk in a refined bosom at seventeen. Man would scarcely have guessed but for Jane Eyre the impression ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... impossibly vivacious wits. Nature has a finer grace; its faithful reflection is purer art. Those true to natural humour and the spontaneous rather than the fabricated repartee represent a small minority. Amongst the novelists Goldsmith and Jane Austen have few to follow them, and with the dramatists Moliere and Pinero are almost his solitary associates. Perfectly natural are the arguments, 'mid trips and assaults, between Mr. Burchell and Mrs. Primrose in The Vicar of Wakefield, and Hastings and Mrs. Hardcastle in She Stoops ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... being a Narrative of Researches and Discoveries amidst the Ruins of Assyria. With an Account of the Chaldean Christians of Kurdistan; the Yezidis, or Devil-worshippers; and an Enquiry into the Manners and Arts of the Ancient Assyrians. By AUSTEN H. LAYARD, D.C.L. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... naturalness, in their sense, meant conformity to nature as it is commonly seen. This is the characteristic feature of the class. Whether, like Richardson, they analyse character from within, or, like Miss Austen, develop it in the outward particularities of an unruffled life—whether they describe, like Fielding, the buoyancy of a generous animalism, or, like Miss Edgeworth and Miss Burney, the precise decencies of conventional morality—they ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... Tourguenieff; but how much more intimate, how much deeper is the delight that a Russian finds in his novels than ours! However truly the purely artistic qualities may touch us—great art is universal—we miss our native land and our race in Tourguenieff. We find both in Dickens, in Thackeray. Miss Austen and Fielding have little else; and vague though Fielding may be in form, still his pages are England, and they whisper the life we inherited from long ago. The superb Rembrandt in the next room, the Gentleman with a Hawk, ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... had set the fashion, women pressed boldly forward into literary ranks, although the author of "Waverley" absorbed in a great degree the curiosity of the reading public. Miss Austen, whose work is destined, in the opinion of good judges, to survive with the language, made her first venture, like the author of "Evelina," anonymously; but it created no such furore. This was "Sense and Sensibility," ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... prepare for it, and whose work did save the whole world, is cast out of office. And when the war is won, and Lord Haldane's position has been publicly and nobly vindicated by Lord Haig, Mr. Lloyd George as Prime Minister of England has a portfolio for Mr. Austen Chamberlain and another for Dr. Macnamara, but none for this man to whom more than to any other politician he owes his place ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... purposely not fastened or fixed to the frame-work or stand on which it was supported, but left loose, so as to be set on or taken off; and in 1555, on the accession of Queen Mary, when the stone altars were restored and the communion-tables taken down, we find it recorded of one John Austen, at Adesham Church, Kent, that "he with other tooke up the table, and laid it on a chest in the chancel, and set the tressels ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... our ways. They would think us marvellously ill-bred. While we! I dare scarcely harbour the thought, much less express it. Anyway, it is certain that they occasionally allowed Sheridan and Miss Burney (I am not even thinking of the remote people of Fielding), and even, alas! Miss Austen, to paint pictures of them which we would scarcely own up to from novelists and playwrights of our day, and therefore I return to my puzzle: is time an unbroken continuity, all its subdivisions merely conventional, like those of postal districts; ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... Jane Austen has left two on record. The first was suggested by reading in a newspaper the marriage of a Mr. Gell to ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... faults of Balzac's work are, indeed, sufficiently obvious and sufficiently grave. The same coarseness of fibre which appears in his style made him incapable of understanding the delicacies of life—the refined shades of emotion, the subtleties of human intercourse. He probably never read Jane Austen; but if he had he certainly would have considered her an utterly pointless writer; and he would have been altogether at sea in a novel by Henry James. The elusive things that are so important, the indecisive things that are so curious, the ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... of the mind and heart. She was not content to paint the surface of nature, to give photographic sketches of the outside of human life, but she wished to realize every subtle fact and every most secret impulse. An admirer of the Dutch school in painting, and of Jane Austen as a novelist, she was not content with their results and methods, wishing to interpret the spirit as well as the letter of ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... stuff for walking sticks, and advised with both concerning the taste of summer folks in dress and in canes. The winter came, and she read many books in its long leisure, mostly novels, out of the rector's library. He had a whole set of Miss Edgeworth, and nearly all of Miss Austen and Miss Gurney, and he gave of them to Clementina, as the best thing for her mind as well as her morals; he believed nothing could be better for any one than these old English novels, which he had nearly forgotten in their details. She colored the faded English life of the stories afresh from ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and Richardson to the England of Miss Austen, from the England of Miss Austen to the England of railways and free trade, how vast the change! Yet perhaps Sir Charles Grandison would not seem so strange to us now as one of ourselves will seem to our great-grandchildren. The world moves ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... is a tale such as Miss Austen might have been proud of, and Goldsmith would not have disowned. It is well told, and excites a ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... medley of books there is round my pillar! Here is Jane Austen leaning against Heine—what would she have said to that, I wonder?—with Miss Mitford and Cranford to keep her in countenance on her other side. Here is my Goethe, one of many editions I have of him, the one that has made the acquaintance of the ice-house and the poppies. ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... as the children grew older, and the family tradition of bookishness took hold of them, there were shelves and shelves to be devoured, a strange mixture—Thackeray, Maeterlinck, Fielding, Hakluyt, Ibsen, Dickens, Ruskin, Shaw, Austen, Moliere, Defoe, Cervantes, Shakespeare,—the children dipped, or tasted or swallowed whole, according to their temperaments and ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... this pious deacon was to be condemned, while in the stocks in the bishop's coal-house, he had the vision of a glorified form, which much encouraged him. This he certainly attested to his wife, Mr. Austen, and others, before his death; but Mr. Fox, in reciting this article, leaves it to the reader's judgment, to consider it either as ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox |
