“In my spare times at Bath I’ve been reading Jane Austen and the more I read the more I admire and respect and do reverence. What are your views? When she looks straight at a man or a woman she is greater than those who were alive with her—by a whole head. Greater than Charles [Dickens]; greater than Walter [Scott]—with a more delicate hand and a keener scalpel.”
Rudyard Kipling, letter to C.R.L. Fletcher (April 10, 1915)