Quote of the...month: Mark Twain on Jane Austen

There are several anti-Austen quotations attributed to Mark Twain. Seems he hated her work with a rather violent passion. Here is my favorite; it always makes me smile:


I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

 - Mark Twain, in a letter to Joseph Twitchell, 1898