Mary Lascelles Quotes & Sayings

A clever girl may pass through the phase of foolish miss on the way to sensible woman. — Mary Lascelles

The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not be controlled nor put to sleep. In a poet this must often be the visual imagination, bringing before his eyes a succession of images which he never summoned, and of which some (it is only too likely) will be ugly or pitiful. — Mary Lascelles

The sole agents, indeed, in the action of her novels are individual human beings. And the comedy is the outcome of their making fools of themselves and of one another. — Mary Lascelles

A story conducted by the time of a clock and calendars alone would be a story not of human beings but of mechanical toys. — Mary Lascelles

Charlotte Palmer is no sillier than Harriet Smith; and yet, how intolerable we should find it to see and hear as much of Charlotte as we do of Harriet! And would Miss Bates have been endurable if she had been presented in the mood and manners of Sense and Sensibility? — Mary Lascelles

When many story-tellers occupy themselves with a social world which offers no great variety of lively action, their stories will probably resemble one another as to many of the major incidents, and if they draw on these limited resources like spend thrifts such resemblances will be inevitable
and therefore not significant. — Mary Lascelles

Others beside Jane Austen have made their Eltons, though none quite so cooly as she. — Mary Lascelles

In Jane Austen it was the critical faculty that would not be quieted; and that faculty in her, played on men and women. — Mary Lascelles

Mannerism, especially when it takes the form of recurrent word or phrase, is by no means easy to represent; there is but a hair's breadth between the point at which the reader delightfully recognizes is as a revealing habit of speech, and the point at which its iteration begin to weary him. — Mary Lascelles

Sympathy compounded of liking and compassion in varying proportions evidently seemed to Jane Austen the most natural inventive to imaginative interest in a character. — Mary Lascelles

Jane Austen's narrative style seems to me to show (especially in the later novels) a curiously chameleon-like faculty; it varies in colour as the habits of expression of the several characters impress themselves on the relation of the episode in which they are involved, and on the description of their situations. — Mary Lascelles

Jane Austen never repeats herself. — Mary Lascelles

Landscapes we must owe something to the eye of the beholder. — Mary Lascelles

As for Elizabeth Bennet, our chief reason for accepting her point of view as a reflection of her author's is the impression that she bears of sympathy between them
an impression of which almost every reader would be sensible, even if it had not the explicit confirmation of Jane Austen's letters. Yet, as she is presented to us in Pride and Prejudice, she is but a partial and sometimes perverse observer. — Mary Lascelles

Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing of the thoughts of their characters. — Mary Lascelles