Emma

Austen's characters are unquestionably one key to her greatness. Her understanding of the human heart is forensic and also frosted with the necessary detachment that gives deeper meaning to her rendering of human frailty.. In Emma, Jane Austen shows us the halting development of an adolescent girl from perky narcissism to something approaching empathy

Guardian

For those of us who suspect all the mysteries of life are contained in the microcosm of the family, that personal relationships prefigure all else, the work of Jane Austen is the Rosetta Stone of literature

Anna Quindlen

How could these novels ever seem remote...the gaiety is unextinguished today, the irony has kept its bite, the reasoning is still sweet, the sparkle undiminished, as comedies they are irresistibly and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be

Eudora Welty

I'd like to write a play as perfect as Emma

Simon Gray

It is the cleverest of books. I especially love the dialogue - every speech reveals the characters' obsessions and preoccupations, yet it remains perfectly natural...absolutely gripping

Susannah Clarke

Jane Austen is my favourite author! Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers

E.M. Forster

Like Irvine Welsh, I am a great admirer of Jane Austen

Alexander McCall Smith

That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements of feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with

Sir Walter Scott

The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste

Virginia Woolf