“I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen. She is my favorite author! I read and reread, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers.”
—E. M. Forster

“What makes a classic is not that it is praised by critics, expounded by professors and studied in college classes, but that the great mass of readers, generation after generation, have found pleasure and spiritual profit in reading it. It is difficult to decide which is the best of [Austen’s novels] because they are all so good, and each one has its devoted, and even fanatic, admirers.”
—Somerset Maugham

“For those of us who suspect that all the mysteries of life are contained in the microcosm of the family, that personal relationships prefigure all else, the work of Jane Austen is the Rosetta stone of literature.”
—Anna Quindlen

“Jane Austen seems the writer nearest to a composer of classical music, her novels well-wrought symphonies; turbulent depths coexist with ordered surfaces and the ratio of the expected to the unexpected feels just as it should. Each time I read her — and she is one of the few novelists who can be read and reread — I know I have not exhausted the books; something has again escaped me, as it does from a concert performance of a complex musical piece.”
—Janet Todd

“The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste. Never did any novelist make more use of an impeccable sense of human values. It is against the disc of an unerring heart, an unfailing good taste, an almost stern morality, that she shows up those deviations from kindness, truth, and sincerity which are among the most delightful things in English literature.”
—Virginia Woolf

“She has made leading ladies of the sensible sisters. She created a world where dashing, if arrogant, men seem to fall madly in love with the women who have more brains than fancy ribbons.”
—Amy Heckerling

“The witty precision of Austen’s style has entertained readers for nearly two hundred years without losing its freshness and power to delight, a testimony to her unparalleled genius and to the enduring powers of the English language.”
—Diane Johnson

“The novels’ vitality is irresistible for us. The irony has kept its bite, the reasoning is still sweet, the sparkle undiminished. Their high spirits, their wit, their celerity and harmony of motion, their symmetry of design appear still unrivaled in the English novel. Jane Austen’s work at its best seems as nearly flawless as any fiction could be.”
—Eudora Welty