- "Also read again and for the third time at least Miss Austen's very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvement and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!"
- Scott, Walter. "Walter Scott, an unsigned review of Emma, Quarterly Review." Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1812–1870. Ed. B. C. Southam. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968.
Villainous Foe: Our Crazy Uncle, Mark Twain
- "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 (1897)
- "To me his (Edgar Allan Poe's) 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 William Dean Howells (1909-01-18)
- "I often want to criticize 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. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
- Letter, 13 September 1898, in A.B. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (1912)
Chivalrous Friend: Anthony Trollope (1870)
- "Miss Austen was surely a great novelist. What she did, she did perfectly. Her work, as far as it goes, is faultless. She wrote of the times in which she lived, of the class of people with which she associated, and in the language which was usual to her as an educated lady. Of romance, -- what we generally mean when we speak of romance -- she had no tinge. Heroes and heroines with wonderful adventures there are none in her novels. Of great criminals and hidden crimes she tells us nothing. But she places us in a circle of gentlemen and ladies, and charms us while she tells us with an unconscious accuracy how men should act to women, and women act to men. It is not that her people are all good; -- and, certainly, they are not all wise. The faults of some are the anvils on which the virtues of others are hammered till they are bright as steel. In the comedy of folly I know no novelist who has beaten her. The letters of Mr. Collins, a clergyman in Pride and Prejudice, would move laughter in a low-church archbishop."
- Anthony Trollope, Lecture (1870)
Chivalrous Friend: G. K. Chesterton (1913)
- "Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told)
protected women from truth, were burst by the Brontës or elaborately
untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew more
about men than either of them. Jane Austen may have been protected from
truth: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her."
- The Victorian Age in Literature (1913)
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