What others said of Jane Austen and her work:

"Miss Austen has no romance... What vile creatures her parsons are!" - Cardinal Newman (1837)

"I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers" - Mrs. Mitford, an acquaintence with a personal dislike

"To me his prose is unreadable - like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death." - Mark Twain, Letter to W. D. Howells, 1/18/1909

"Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it." - Mark Twain, Following the Equator

"I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone." -Mark Twain Letter to Joseph Twichell, 9/13/1898

"Why do you like Jane Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. ... I had not seen Pride and Prejudice till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? ...a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. ... These observations will probably irritate you, but I shall run the risk." - Charlotte Brontë, January 12, 1848

Of Mansfield Park:
"Did not much like it -- not to be compared to P. & P. -- nothing interesting in the Characters -- Language poor. -- Characters natural & well supported -- Improved as it went on." - Fanny Cage, a friend of Jane's.

Of Mansfield Park:
"Did not like it near so well as P. & P. -- thought it wanted Incident. -" - Charles Austen, her youngest brother.