Quotes on On Writing
Austen left no essays or manifestos — her thoughts on her own craft survive mainly in letters to family, which makes them precious. The 'little bit of ivory' remark to her nephew and the '3 or 4 families in a country village' advice to her niece are as close as we get to a poetics: miniature scale, total control, human nature as the only subject worth the labour. Both lines describe a deliberately narrow canvas — a handful of families, a small provincial world — worked over with enormous care rather than a sprawling, event-driven plot, which matches exactly what her surviving manuscripts and revision habits show: repeated, careful reworking of small social scenes rather than large-scale incident. Her closing aside in Mansfield Park about declining to 'dwell on guilt and misery' is one of her clearest statements of authorial intent in the novels themselves — a deliberate choice about what a story owes its reader, and what it doesn't.
“Wisdom is better than wit, and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.”
“In short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature... are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”
“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can.”
“The little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour.”
“I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”
“Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. The pen has been in their hands.”
“Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick & wicked.”
“3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on.”