The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste.Virginia Woolf, 1925It wasn't really me that everyone went crazy about—it was the character [Fitzwilliam Darcy], who'd been around for a couple of centuries.Colin Firth, 1997Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.Mark Twain, 1898For 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, 1995