Catherine Hawley

“Superficially, in Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen is describing a world that has vanished. Go below the surface, however, and she is coming close to people, with their absurd hopes and fears, their little meannesses and acts of generosity, as they still are today. Consider carefully Mr and Mrs Bennet, Elizabeth, Jane and Lydia, Darcy and Bingley and Wickham, Lady Catherine and Mr Collins, and you will soon discover people not unlike them all around you… “That she was a great novelist, and remains one, there can be no doubt whatever. She is not great in the sense of being huge, expansive, overwhelming, as novelists like Tolstoy and Dickens and Balzac are. She created for her own use, as we have seen, a tiny world of her own, but no novelist before or since has succeeded better than she did in bringing close to perfection what she set out to do … Make friends with this quiet but brilliant woman, this superb artist in fiction, and you have made a friend for life.” — J. B. Priestley