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Jane Austen? Why I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane
Austen. Even if it contains no other book.
- quoted in Remembered Yesterdays, Robert Underwood Johnson
To me his prose is unreadable -- like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but
not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 18 January 1909
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 in it.
- Following the Equator
I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise
Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have
to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over
the skull with her own shin-bone.
- Letter to Joseph Twichell, 13 September 1898
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