Your online source for Jane Austen and her legacy
From the desk of Laurel Ann Nattress:
In honor of lovers everywhere we are highlighting some of Jane Austen’s insights on courtship, love, and marriage in her novels, and in her life, on the most romantic day of the year, Valentine’s Day.
Here are 24 of the best quotes to include in a card, express directly to your friends, family, or inamorata, or just revel in today. Continue reading “24 of the Best Jane Austen Quotes on Courtship, Love, and Marriage to Share with Your Valentine”
From the desk of Laurel Ann Nattress:
Hot off the presses is a new Jane Austen quote book.
I know what you are thinking. Why do I need yet another pithy volume of my favorite author’s best lines jockeying for position on my bedside table along with my Jane Austen bobblehead and my “Waiting for Mr. Darcy” candle?
Well, …it really helps that this new compilation of daily quotes has been edited by, and the foreword written by, Stone Cold Jane Austen, a.k.a. Devoney Looser, Foundation Professor of English at Arizona State University, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. Continue reading “A Preview of The Daily Jane Austen: A Year of Quotes, by Jane Austen & Devoney Looser”
I could not let this day pass without wishing Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice a happy 199th birthday.
Written between October 1796 and August 1797, Pride and Prejudice was first entitled First Impression and would not premiere on the printed page until after many revisions and another sixteen years. Publisher Thomas Egerton of Whitehall (London) purchased the copyright from Jane Austen for £110 (worth £3,735.60 or $5,867.77 today). She would make no further pecuniary emolument from her most popular novel in her lifetime.
We have all had the pleasure of enjoying her “light, bright and sparkling” prose for almost 200 years now. Renowned for her witty dialogue, the friction between Austen’s hero Mr. Darcy and heroine Elizabeth Bennet has given us some of the most memorable lines in literature. Here are a few of my favorites:
“She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting your time with me.” (Mr Darcy to Mr. Bingley about Elizabeth Bennet; Ch. 3)
“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.” (Elizabeth Bennet about Mr. Darcy; Ch. 5)
“Your conjecture is totally wrong, I assure you. My mind was more agreeably engaged. I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow.” (Mr. Darcy to Miss Bingley; Ch. 6)
“A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.” (Mr. Darcy to Miss Bingley; Ch. 6)
“Nothing is more deceitful,” said Darcy, “than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.” (Mr. Darcy; Ch. 10)
“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil— a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.”
“And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.”
“And yours,” he replied with a smile, “is willfully to misunderstand them.” (Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet; Ch. 11)
“It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion, to be secure of judging properly at first.”
“May I ask to what these questions tend?”
“Merely to the illustration of your character,” said she, endeavouring to shake off her gravity. “I am trying to make it out.”
“And what is your success?”
She shook her head. “I do not get on at all. I hear such different accounts of you as puzzle me exceedingly.” (Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet; Ch. 18)
“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it…” (Elizabeth Bennet; Chapter 24)
“There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.” (Elizabeth Bennet; Chapter 31)
“I certainly have not the talent which some people possess,” said Darcy, “of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done.”
“My fingers,” said Elizabeth, “do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women’s do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault- because I would not take the trouble of practising…” (Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet; Ch. 31)
“In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” (Mr. Darcy; Ch. 34)
“I have never desired your good opinion, and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly. I am sorry to have occasioned pain to anyone. It has been most unconsciously done, however, and I hope will be of short duration.” (Elizabeth Bennet; Ch. 34)
“From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.” (Elizabeth Bennet; Ch. 34)
“If Mr. Darcy is neither by honour nor inclination confined to his cousin, why is not he to make another choice? And if I am that choice, why may not I accept him?”
“Because honour, decorum, prudence, nay, interest, forbid it. Yes, Miss Bennet, interest; for do not expect to be noticed by his family or friends, if you wilfully act against the inclinations of all. You will be censured, slighted, and despised, by everyone connected with him. Your alliance will be a disgrace; your name will never even be mentioned by any of us.”
“These are heavy misfortunes,” replied Elizabeth. “But the wife of Mr. Darcy must have such extraordinary sources of happiness necessarily attached to her situation, that she could, upon the whole, have no cause to repine.” (Lady Catherine and Elizabeth Bennet; Ch. 56)
“You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.” (Mr. Darcy; Ch. 58)
“My dearest sister, now be serious. I want to talk very seriously. Let me know every thing that I am to know, without delay. Will you tell me how long you have loved him?”
“It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.” (Jane Bennet and Elizabeth Bennet; Ch. 59)
“I cannot fix on the hour, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.” (Mr. Darcy; Ch. 60)
These are only a few of the amazing moments in Pride and Prejudice. Did I miss some your favorites? If so, do share.
Cheers,
© 2007 – 2012, Laurel Ann Nattress, Austenprose
Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park really gets a bum rap from critics and readers. Sometimes I think that I am its only advocate, campaigning to an empty room. Granted, it is not as emotionally charged as Sense and Sensibility or as light, bright and sparkly as Pride and Prejudice, but it does have an admirable heroine in gentle Fanny Price and two viper-like antagonists in Mary and Henry Crawford, that other authors just dream about creating.
I find the arguments against it are thin. Some say MP is overly moralistic, dismally dark, and the hero and heroine are wimps. (So harsh) I say they are not reading the same novel that I am. All this remonstrance was prompted by a conversation I had today with a customer at work. As a bookseller, I recommend books all day long. Today, when I offered Mansfield Park to a young lady who loved P&P and S&S, her mom flatly said no, pronouncing that she would not like it. Inwardly, I cringed at such parental reproach. Give the kid a chance to make up her own mind. So Mansfield Park was eliminated because mom didn’t like it when she read it thirty years ago. Geesh.
So for all those parents out there that think they are doing your kids a favor, let them make there own decisions and mistakes with the classics. Just be HAPPY they want to read them.
On a more upbeat note, here are a few of my favorite quotes from Mansfield Park to remind skeptics that there are some grand one liners.
“But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them.” The Narrator, Chapter 1
“Do not let us be frightened from a good deed by a trifle.” Mrs. Norris, Chapter 1
“Nothing ever fatigues me but doing what I do not like.” Mary Crawford, Chapter 7
“Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no hope of a cure.” Mary Crawford, Chapter 7
“Everybody likes to go their own way–to choose their own time and manner of devotion.” Mary Crawford, Chapter 9
“Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.” Mary Crawford, Chapter 9
“To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure, is the most perfect refreshment.” Fanny Price, Chapter 9
It was a quick succession of busy nothings. The Narrator, Chapter 10
“Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.” Mary Crawford, Chapter 11
“Those who have not more must be satisfied with what they have.” Mrs. Rushworth, Chapter 12
“Let your conduct be the only harangue.” Edmund Bertram, Chapter 15
“Oh! you can do nothing but what you do already: be plagued very often, and never lose your temper.” Mary Crawford, Chapter 22
“A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.” Mary Crawford, Chapter 22
“A woman can never be too fine while she is all in white.” Edmund Bertram, Chapter 23
The enthusiasm of a woman’s love is even beyond the biographer’s. The Narrator, Chapter 27
“I am worn out with civility,” said he. “I have been talking incessantly all night, and with nothing to say.” Edmund Bertram, Chapter 28
“We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” Fanny Price, Chapter 42
“Nobody minds having what is too good for them.” The Narrator, Chapter 48
Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can. Narrator, Chapter 48
So there!
Austenprose 