“Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing of the thoughts of their characters. ”

“Sympathy compounded of liking and compassion in varying proportions evidently seemed to Jane Austen the most natural inventive to imaginative interest in a character.”

“Jane Austen never repeats herself.”

“Jane Austen's narrative style seems to me to show (especially in the later novels) a curiously chameleon-like faculty; it varies in colour as the habits of expression of the several characters impress themselves on the relation of the episode in which they are involved, and on the description of their situations.”

“In Jane Austen it was the critical faculty that would not be quieted; and that faculty in her, played on men and women.”

“Others beside Jane Austen have made their Eltons, though none quite so cooly as she.”

“I suspect that Jane Austen's practice of denying herself the aid of figurative language which, as much as any of her other habits of expression, repelled Charlotte Brontë, and has alienated other readers, conscious with a dissatisfaction with her style that they have not cared to analyse. ”