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
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Money
I am afraid that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Work
To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Dance, Dancing
Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Neighbors
We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Cities, Morality, City Life
Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Complaining, Pessimism, Problems, Sympathy, Complaints
You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Fear
Business, you know, may bring you money, but friendship hardly ever does.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Business, Friendship, Money
Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation?
—Jane Austen
Everybody’s heart is open, you know, when they have recently escaped from severe pain, or are recovering the blessing of health.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Health
In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Love, Affection
Only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Fortune, Women, Misfortunes
What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Weather
Where a man does his best with only moderate powers, he will have the advantage over negligent superiority.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Power
To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Women
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: Dancing, Dance
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
From politics it was an easy step to silence.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Silence
With men he can be rational and unaffected, but when he has ladies to please, every feature works.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Men and Women, Men & Women, Women, Men
Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Women
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
They are much to be pitied who have not been … given a taste for nature early in life.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Nature
For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?
—Jane Austen
Topics: Sports, 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
Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Writing
Grant us grace, Almighty Father, so to pray as to deserve to be heard.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Prayer
History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. I read it a little as a duty; but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilence in every page; the men so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.
—Jane Austen
Topics: History
That sanguine expectation of happiness which is happiness itself.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Happiness
There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Home
The post office has a great charm at one point of our lives. When you have lived to my age, you will begin to think letters are never worth going through the rain for.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Letters
It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Churches, Religion
I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Selfishness, Principles
There is safety in reserve, but no attraction. One cannot love a reserved person.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Safety
One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.
—Jane Austen
To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Nature
Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Optimism
It is indolence… Indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Religion, Churches
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
Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Vanity
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