Jane Austen (1775–1817) was a English novelist who wrote such celebrated novels Sense and Sensibility (1811,) Pride and Prejudice (1813,) Mansfield Park (1814,) Emma (1815,) and Persuasion (1818.) The latter, together with the earlier Northanger Abbey (begun in 1798,) were published after her death.
Austen was born into the English gentry, whose customs feature prominently in her novels. She shared a room for her whole life with her older sister Cassandra. Neither of them ever married. Not much is known about Jane’s life beyond minor details recorded in the letters that have survived—Cassandra burned or edited most of Jane’s correspondence. Jane had no personal acquaintance with any other prominent writer.
At the focal point of all of Austen’s novels is the complicated maneuvering that leads to marriage. Austen considers marriage not as a dull romantic climax, but as a complex moral and social conciliation that exposes much about human nature and frailty by substituting mental clarity and good judgment with idealization and self-deception. In Sense and Sensibility, her first book, Austen attempts to make sense of the discord between demands of heart and head. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen’s best-known novel, protagonist Elizabeth Bennet realizes how appearances could mislead, and what she could learn from recognizing the prejudices of the observer.
Austen died at 42, probably of Addison’s disease, lymphoma, or—as has been recently alleged—arsenic poisoning.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Jane Austen
With men he can be rational and unaffected, but when he has ladies to please, every feature works.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Men & Women, Women, Men and Women, Men
I am afraid that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Work
There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Disappointment
To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Nature
In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided among the sexes.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Excellence
There is safety in reserve, but no attraction. One cannot love a reserved person.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Safety
Do not give way to useless alarm; though it is right to be prepared for the worst, there is no occasion to look on it as certain.
—Jane Austen
To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Enjoyment
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of someone or other of their daughters.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Men & Women, Family, Fortune
Friendship is the finest balm for the pangs of despised love.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Friendship
Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Opinion, Public opinion, Opinions
I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Selfishness, Principles
Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Pride, Vanity
Where a man does his best with only moderate powers, he will have the advantage over negligent superiority.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Power
Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Vanity
One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Cities, City Life
An engaged woman is always more agreeable than a disengaged. She is satisfied with herself. Her cares are over, and she feels that she may exert all her powers of pleasing without suspicion. All is safe with a lady engaged; no harm can be done.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Marriage
Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.
—Jane Austen
It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind; but when a beginning is made—when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt—it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Dance, Dancing
Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced and the inconvenience is often considerable.
—Jane Austen
A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Women, Misfortunes, Fortune
Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Complaining, Problems, Pessimism, Sympathy, Complaints
Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Women
Business, you know, may bring you money, but friendship hardly ever does.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Money, Friendship, Business
The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient-at others so bewildered and weak-and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control!
—Jane Austen
Topics: Memory
It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Marriage
For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?
—Jane Austen
Topics: Neighbors, Sports
I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Reading
Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Neighbors
It is very well worthwhile to be tormented for two or three years of one’s life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Reading
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