"No one has ever looked on Jane Austen as a great stylist. Her spelling is peculiar and her grammar often shaky, but she has a good ear. I think the influence of Dr Johnson can be discerned in the structure of her sentences. She is apt to use the word of Latin origin rather than the plain English one, the abstract rather than the concrete. It gives her phrase a slight formality which is far from unpleasant: indeed it often adds point to a witty remark and a demure savor to a malicious one. Her dialogue is probably as natural as dialogue can ever be. To set down on paper speech as it is spoken would be very tedious, and some arrangement of it is necessary.
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As [Sir Walter] Scott said, Miss Austen deals with commonplace things, the involvements, feelings, and characters of ordinary life; nothing very much happens and yet when you reach the bottom of the page you eagerly turn it in order to know what will happen next; nothing very much does and again you turn the page with the same eagerness. The power of making you do this is the greatest gift a novelist can have and I often wondered what creates it. Why is it that even when you have read the novel* over and over again your interest never flags? I think with Jane Austen it is because she was so immensely interested in her characters and in what happened to them and because she profoundly believed in them."