Mark Twain quotes are Focaccia for the Soul. Even when they’re slathered in sentiment that I don’t care for, the underlying doughy slabs of wisdom are always worth relishing.
To wit, Mark Twain on Jane Austen (here):
*Jane Austen? Why I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book.
*It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
*I often want to criticise 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. Everytime I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
Comic hyperbole aside, Twain must find something redeeming in reading Austen – otherwise, why would he say ‘Everytime I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’?’ Perhaps Twain, like so many other English scholars, could not fully accept Austen as a major writer because her gushy tomes dealt with tedious upper-class precoccupations such as marriage and courtship. But these were the primary obsessions of the society in which she was cloistured. This was all Jane Austen knew, and Twain himself once said “Experience is an author’s most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.” And who can deny the vitality of Austen’s writing when she very properly satirizes her society’s rituals all the while appealing to the romantic notions of her readers? It is her deadpan seriousness about the trivial that makes it all seem so absurd.
