I just finished reading Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. I always walk away from an Austen novel feeling thoroughly entertained and smiling at being reminded of how clever she is. A feminist before it was cool. She's making light of someone's reality (her own actually) and I seem to be the only one in on the joke. I sometimes feel like it's a secret we share as I'm reading her book.
A few of my favorite quotes from this book:
"Mrs. Allen was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like well enough to marry them."
"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid."
"Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman, especially if she has the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can."
"The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance."
"It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of a man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire... Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter."
