jacob graham’s Reviews > Persuasion > Status Update

4/4: ". . . To hope to make so much out of so little showed no common confidence in her own powers, and more than common daring. Of the thousands who take up a pen to write a story meant to amuse, how many are there who can, or who dare, be true, like Jane Austen?"

—appendix extract from Julia Kavanagh, "The Language of Feeling," from "English Women of Letters" (1862)

". . . To hope to make so much out of so little showed no common confidence in her own powers, and more than common daring. Of the thousands who take up a pen to write a story meant to amuse, how many are there who can, or who dare, be true, like Jane Austen?"

—appendix extract from Julia Kavanagh, "The Language of Feeling," from "English Women of Letters" (1862)

3/4: ". . . In her own range, and admitting her cold views of life to be true, she is faultless, or almost faultless . . . The value of light and shade, as a means of success, she discarded. Strong contrasts, bold flights, she shunned. To be true, to show life in its everyday aspect, was her ambition . . ."

1/4: "But it was natural that powers so great should fail somewhere . . . [T]he delicate mind that could evolve, so shrewdly, foolishness from its deepest recesses, was powerless when strong feelings had to be summoned. They heard her, but they did not obey the call . . ."

2/2: ". . . It seems so natural . . . so easy, that we are apt to forget the performance in the sense of its reality. The literary taste of the majority is always tinged with coarseness; it loves exaggeration, & slights the modesty of truth."

—appendix extract from Julia Kavanagh, "The Language of Feeling," from "English Women of Letters" (1862)

1/2: "Wonderful, indeed, is the power that out of materials so slender, out of characters so imperfectly marked, could fashion a story. This is her great, her prevailing merit, & yet it cannot be denied, it is one that injures her with many readers . . ."

3/3: ". . . Slender, & Shallow, & Aguecheek, as Shakespeare has painted them, though equally fools, resemble one another no more than Richard, & Macbeth, & Julius Caesar; and Miss Austen's Mrs. Bennett, Mr. Rushworth, & Miss Bates, are no more alike than her Darcy, Knightley, & Edmund Bertram."

—appendix extract of Richard Whateley, "A New Style of Novel," Quarterly Review, 1821

2/3: ". . . To invent . . . a conversation full of wisdom or of wit, requires that the writer should himself possess ability; but . . . it is no fool that can describe fools well; & many who have succeeded pretty well in painting superior characters, have failed in giving individuality to those weaker ones . . . necessary to . . . a faithful representation of real life: they exhibit . . . mere folly in the abstract."

1/3: ". . .[Austen introduces] frequent conversations; which she conducts with a regard to character hardly exceeded even by Shakespeare himself. Like him, she shows as admirable a discrimination in the characters of fools as of people of sense; a merit which is far from common . . ."

"Her spring of felicity was in the glow of her spirits, as her friend Anne's was in the warmth of her heart."