Quotes on Austen [part 2]

Well, currently working on page 21 of my thesis... its getting there. A few more fun ones:

"...there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them… Such is the common cant.—“And what are you reading, Miss----?” “Oh! it is only a novel!” replies the young lady… “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;”  or, in short, 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, Northanger Abbey, in defense of the novel

"But while Emily Brontë was as unsociable as a storm at midnight, and while Charlotte Brontë was at best like that warmer and more domestic thing, a house on fire—they do connect themselves with the calm of George Eliot, as the forerunners of many later developments of the feminine advance." - G.K. Chesterton [okay, not on Austen, but it was too funny to pass up]

"Men like Coleridge or Carlyle… had gone through furnaces of culture where even less creative people might have been inflamed to creation. Jane Austen was not inflamed or inspired or even moved to be a genius; she simply was a genius. Her fire, what there was of it, began with herself… There was nothing in her circumstances, or even in her materials, that seems obviously meant for the making of such an artist." - G.K. Chesterton, introduction to "Love and Freindship" (1922)