Jane Austen's delicate and ironic art will remain unassailable through
all changes of taste and varieties of opinion. What she really
possesses--what might be called the clue to her inimitable secret--is
nothing less than the power of giving expression to that undying
ironic detachment, touched with a fine malice but full of tender
understanding, which all women, to some degree or other, share, and
which all men, to some degree or other, suffer from; in other words,
the terrible and beautiful insight of the maternal instinct. The clear
charm of her unequalled style--a style quite classical in its economy
of material and its dignified reserve--is a charm frequently caught in
the wit and fine malice of one's unmarried aunts; but it is, none the
less, the very epitome of maternal humor. As a creative realist,
giving to her characters the very body and pressure of actual life, no
writer, living or dead, has surpassed her. Without romance, without
philosophy, without social theories, without pathological curiosity,
without the remotest interest in "Nature," she has yet managed to
achieve a triumphant artistic success; and to leave an impression of
serene wisdom such as no other woman writer has equaled or approached.