Pride and Prejudice

The best-loved book by our best-loved novelist

Independent

The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste

Virginia Woolf

Like Irvine Welsh, I am a great admirer of Jane Austen

Alexander McCall Smith

Another question I've been regularly asked over the past year is what models I had in mind when writing Curious Incident. Was it To Kill a Mockingbird? Was it Catcher in the Rye? In fact, the book most often in my mind was Pride and Prejudice

Mark Haddon

An incredibly funny, very upmarket love story with an enchanting heroine and the perfect romantic hero: a tartar with a heart of gold

Jilly Cooper

The Mozart opera of novels and again a transcendent union of structure and content in which unhappy marriage is the reward for those who show a weakness of character and lifelong happiness is a province reserved only for those "who truly know themselves"

Kate Atkinson

For 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

How could these novels ever seem remote...the gaiety is unextinguished today, the irony has kept its bite, the reasoning is still sweet, the sparkle undiminished, as comedies they are irresistibly and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be

Eudora Welty

That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements of feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with

Sir Walter Scott

The most perfect, the most characteristic, the most eminently quintessential of its author's works

George Saintsbury (1894)