“Long in body, late in arrival, Jane would always have an uneasy relationship with her mother. Her fiction is full of bad mothers: Mrs Dashwood and Mrs Bennet, who lack sense, Mrs Price, who lacks attention, and the absent Mrs Woodhouse and Mrs Elliot, both dead when the story starts. Perhaps the trouble began right at the beginning.”

“Long in body, late in arrival, Jane would always have an uneasy relationship with her mother. Her fiction is full of bad mothers: Mrs Dashwood and Mrs Bennet, who lack sense, Mrs Price, who lacks attention, and the absent Mrs Woodhouse and Mrs Elliot, both dead when the story starts. Perhaps the trouble began right at the beginning.”

— Lucy Worsley