Escaping

      In Jane Austen's world I can feel at home and be as much alive as in my own. ... I meet there people who are no mere characters in fiction, but sensible companions, and their thoughts and feelings are in close alliance with what I personally think and feel.
      To enter that world is to visit a congenial set of friends, and I still find that in their company I lose my own cares, much as I lost them on my first visit, thirty years ago. Jane Austen is the perfect novelist of escape ... She does not transport one into fantasy but simply into another, less urgent set of facts. She tells no fairy-tale which  might send us back dazzled and reeling to our contacts with normal life, but diverts us from our preoccupation with another set of problems no less real than our own. ...

from Talking of Jane Austen, by Sheila Kaye-Smith
 and G.B. Stern (1943)

I remember that several of our blogging friends have read this, and its sequel, and liked it — were you one of them? — and I remembered this morning that it was in the stack of books from the college library that I don't have to return quite yet.  That's my day made. :)

{The painting is by Janet Hill.}