Status Updates From Jane Austen: The Critical H...

'"Persuasion" had the greatest success of all; for days, if not weeks, my friend went mouthing its phrases, and chewing the cud of its felicities. "That Sir Walter," he would never weary of repeating, "he's a nib!" And when I tried to find out what had so specially delighted him in "Persuasion," he suddenly and finally summed up the whole of Jane Austen and her work:—"Why, all those people, they're—they're real!"'

'The people who talk of her as if she were a niminy priminy spinster always annoy me.'