Jane Austen Quotes, With the Chapter Each One Comes From

The best Jane Austen quotes are funnier, and often crueller, once you know who is speaking and why. Below are fourteen lines from Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, each copied from the full text and pinned to its chapter, with a note on the scene. Several of the most quoted are said by characters Austen is quietly laughing at.

All four novels are free to read at Project Gutenberg, and the chapter numbers below follow those texts, so you can open the book and find the scene in a minute.

Jane Austen quotes from Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice went on sale on 28 January 1813, credited only to “the Author of Sense and Sensibility”, according to the Jane Austen Society of North America. It began life in 1796-97 as a manuscript called First Impressions.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), chapter 1

The most famous opening line in English fiction is a joke about point of view. The “truth” is only universal in the minds of mothers like Mrs Bennet, and the next sentence admits it: the single man’s own feelings are little known. Read it as Mrs Bennet’s philosophy in the narrator’s best voice and the whole novel comes into focus.

She is tolerable: but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, chapter 3

Darcy says this at the Meryton assembly, close enough for Elizabeth to hear. The insult is double: she is plain, and she is unwanted by anyone else. What Austen does next is the interesting part. Elizabeth tells the story “with great spirit among her friends”, turning the snub into an anecdote, which is exactly the move Darcy has no answer to.

I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, chapter 5

Elizabeth, discussing the assembly with the Lucases. It is the novel’s thesis delivered as a quip, and she does not yet hear what it says about her. Her sister Mary immediately follows it with a pompous little lecture on pride, so Austen gives us the wise line and its parody in the same breath.

I declare, after all, there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, chapter 11

This appears on tote bags and library posters, and it is a trap. Caroline Bingley says it at Netherfield while pretending to read the second volume of whatever Darcy is reading, chosen only because it is his. She yawns, throws the book aside within a sentence, and looks round the room for amusement. Austen wrote the line to mock people who say it. If you like it, our collection of quotes about reading has sincerer ones.

An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, chapter 20

Mr Bennet, summoned by his wife to make Elizabeth accept Mr Collins, builds his sentence like a sermon and then turns it over in the last three words. It is the funniest moment in the book and also an alarming one: this is a father who handles every crisis with a joke and lets the family drift towards disaster.

In vain have I 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.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, chapter 34

The first proposal, at Hunsford parsonage. Lifted out on its own it reads as pure romance, but the very next paragraphs report Darcy dwelling on her inferiority and his family’s objections. The proposal fails because of everything around this sentence. We compare how the 1995 series and the 2005 film stage it in Pride and Prejudice: the book vs the films.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, chapter 57

Mr Bennet again, reading aloud Mr Collins’s warning that Elizabeth may marry Darcy, which he finds hilarious because he thinks Darcy indifferent to her. It sounds like a motto for the whole novel, but the narrator notes Elizabeth “would rather have cried”. The joke is on him.

From Emma

Emma was first on sale on 23 December 1815, though its title page says 1816, and it was Austen’s largest first printing, 2,000 copies, per JASNA.

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

Jane Austen, Emma (1815), Volume I, chapter 1

The hinge is “seemed”. Three adjectives that sound like praise, then a verb that withdraws it. A heroine with “very little to distress or vex her” is a heroine about to be vexed, and the novel spends its length on the gap between seeming and being.

It was badly done, indeed! You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour, to have you now, in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her—and before her niece, too—and before others

Jane Austen, Emma, Volume III, chapter 7 (chapter 43 in continuous numbering)

Mr Knightley, after the Box Hill picnic, where Emma has made a joke at the expense of poor, talkative Miss Bates. Look at the dashes: he keeps adding witnesses, and the sentence gets harder to bear as it goes. Emma cries “almost all the way home”, one of the few times Austen lets a heroine weep without any irony at all.

From Persuasion

Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character; vanity of person and of situation.

Jane Austen, Persuasion (1817), chapter 1

The novel opens with Sir Walter reading his own entry in the Baronetage, and Austen dispatches him in a single sentence. No later scene complicates the verdict; he stays vain to the last page. It is the most purely unforgiving character sketch she ever wrote.

She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.

Jane Austen, Persuasion, chapter 4

This is Anne Elliot, eight years after being talked out of marrying Frederick Wentworth. Most novels of the period move from romance to good sense. This sentence runs that story backwards, and the whole of Persuasion follows from it.

You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever.

Jane Austen, Persuasion, chapter 23 (Volume II, chapter 11)

Wentworth’s letter, written at a desk in a crowded room while he overhears Anne arguing with Captain Harville that women love longest. The setting is what makes it extraordinary. He is eavesdropping and writing at once, so the letter is a reply to a conversation he is not part of. JASNA notes Austen rewrote the ending, adding two new chapters, after finishing a first draft in July 1816.

From Northanger Abbey

“Oh! it is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817), chapter 5

The narrator steps out of the story to defend novels against the people who sneer at them, and names real books by Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth. It is the only place in her fiction where Austen argues in her own voice for her own trade.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, chapter 14

Henry Tilney, on a walk near Bath, after Catherine assumes that gentlemen read better books. He goes on to admit he read The Mysteries of Udolpho in two days with his hair standing on end. A hero who confesses to loving Gothic novels is Austen’s joke on her own readers, and a nice one.

Quick reference: the quotes and their chapters

Reading them in order

The last two books in this list came out together on 20 December 1817, five months after Austen’s death, published by John Murray with a biographical notice by her brother Henry that named her as the author for the first time in print, according to JASNA’s history of Northanger Abbey. Yet Northanger Abbey was written first of the four, in 1798-99, and in 1803 its manuscript, then called Susan, was sold to the publisher Crosby for £10, who never printed it. Henry bought it back for the same £10 in 1816.

If you are building an Austen shelf, our note on how to build a book collection worth keeping covers which editions are worth owning, and the Virginia Woolf quotes page picks up a novelist who wrote admiringly about Austen a century later.

Sources

• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Project Gutenberg eBook #1342
• Jane Austen, Emma, Project Gutenberg eBook #158
• Jane Austen, Persuasion, Project Gutenberg eBook #105
• Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Project Gutenberg eBook #121
• Jane Austen Society of North America, Pride and Prejudice: publishing history
• Jane Austen Society of North America, Emma: publishing history
• Jane Austen Society of North America, Persuasion: publishing history
• Jane Austen Society of North America, Northanger Abbey: publishing history