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
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: Religion, Churches
Business, you know, may bring you money, but friendship hardly ever does.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Business, Friendship, Money
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
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
One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Cities, City Life
She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older – the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Romance
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: Churches, Religion
There are certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are of pretty woman to deserve them.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Men & Women, Men and Women, Women, Men
One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Travel
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 an opinion is general, it is usually correct.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Public opinion, Opinion, Opinions
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 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
And I, Mr. Knightley, am equally stout in my confidence of its not doing them any harm. With all dear Emma’s little faults, she is an excellent creature. Where shall we see a better daughter, or a kinder sister, or a truer friend? No, no; she has qualities which may be trusted; she will never lead any one really wrong; she will make no lasting blunder; where Emma errs once, she is in the right a hundred times.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Loyalty
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
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
There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Home
Where a man does his best with only moderate powers, he will have the advantage over negligent superiority.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Power
From politics it was an easy step to silence.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Silence
That sanguine expectation of happiness which is happiness itself.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Happiness
I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Selfishness, Principles
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: Neighbors, Sports
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Money
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
A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Women, Fortune, Misfortunes
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Pleasure
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
In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided among the sexes.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Excellence
Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Neighbors
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