Only a Novel Quotes

“Man must work, she might well have said, and woman must not weep.”
― Jane Aiken Hodge, Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen

“Fortitude was always to be one of the great virtues for Jane Austen.”
― Jane Aiken Hodge, Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen

“Her description of her method of work has been quoted over and over again by her critics, and I suppose it is no more ironic that this serious bit of self-depreciation should be taken au pied de la lettre than that her comic ones were.”
― Jane Aiken Hodge, Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen

“V. S. Pritchett has a challenging aside in which he describes Jane Austen as a war novelist, pointing out that the facts of the long war are basic to all her books.”
― Jane Aiken Hodge, Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen

“I think, for one’s single book, one would be wise to choose Mansfield Park or Emma rather even than Pride and Prejudice. “Wisdom is better than wit,” as Jane Austen told Fanny, “and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.” People who begin by loving Pride and Prejudice, may end by rereading the later novels more often.”
― Jane Aiken Hodge, Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen

“Jane Austen’s books are always, to some extent, concerned with the problem of learning by painful experience,”
― Jane Aiken Hodge, Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen

“She had lived all her life among clergymen, and may have known too much about them for her own moral comfort. It is impossible to forget that picture of James, “It makes me sad and angry ...” In a fascinating essay on Jane Austen and the Moralists (reprinted in B C Southam’s Critical Essays on Jane Austen), Professor Gilbert Ryle points out that Jane Austen’s heroines “face their moral difficulties and solve their moral problems without recourse to religious faith or theological doctrines. Nor does it ever occur to them to seek the counsels of a clergyman.”
― Jane Aiken Hodge, Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen

“There is something very significant about Jane Austen’s own reservation in her letter about the Evangelicals. She was “at least persuaded that they who are so from reason and feeling, must be happiest and safest”. It leaves one wondering just what her own reason and feeling were telling her. We have no idea. In this passage, she sounds curiously like someone of our own times saying how much they would like to believe in God, if only they could.”
― Jane Aiken Hodge, Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen

“Jane Austen mastered her unscrupulous charmers before she did her heroes.”
― Jane Aiken Hodge, Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen