The attribution is right and the source is almost always wrong. The line is not in Northanger Abbey, not in Sense and Sensibility and not in any letter. Quote Investigator traces it ↗ to Catharine, or the Bower, an unfinished story Austen wrote around 1792, when she was sixteen — and it is not Austen speaking in her own voice but her heroine Kitty Percival, saying it to the shallow Camilla Stanley in an argument about novels.
“If a book is well written, I always find it too short” Jane Austen, but not from the novels. It is spoken by Kitty Percival in "Catharine, or the Bower," an unfinished story Austen wrote around 1792 at the age of sixteen, first printed from the manuscript in 1951. It is commonly and wrongly cited to Northanger Abbey, to Sense and Sensibility, or to one of her letters. Via Quotle.info
Can you use it?
? We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the world of Jane Austen — English novelist · six novels, and three notebooks of teenage writing. Theme: "If a book is well written, I always find it too short". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "If a book is well written, I always find it too short". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The book it actually comes from
Work
Catharine, or the Bower — an unfinished story in the manuscript notebook Austen titled Volume the Third
Written
c. 1792, when Austen was sixteen — not published in her lifetime
Spoken by
Kitty Percival, the story's heroine, in conversation with Camilla Stanley — a character's line, not a diary entry
First printed
Volume the third, now first printed from the manuscript (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), where the story is titled "Kitty; or, The Bower"
if a book is well written, I always find it too short
The wording as Quote Investigator gives it ↗, inside Kitty’s dialogue. Note the lower-case opening: the famous version lifts a clause out of the middle of a sentence and stands it up as an aphorism.
The anchor. Quote Investigator’s 2017 article on this line places it in Catharine, or the Bower, in the mouth of Kitty Percival, and traces the modern circulation back through the scholarship — read the investigation ↗.
Where it is NOT. We searched the complete texts of all six novels, Lady Susan, Love and Freindship and the Brabourne edition of the letters, as published by Project Gutenberg. The phrase “well written” occurs once in the entire set — in Emma, describing a letter — and never in this sentence. Northanger Abbey is here ↗ if you want to check the most commonly named book yourself.
Not on Wikiquote either. Wikiquote’s Jane Austen page lists quotations work by work, including a Northanger Abbey section, and this line appears in none of them — see the page ↗.
Why it went missing.Catharine sat in a manuscript notebook until the middle of the twentieth century: it was first printed from the manuscript in 1951 ↗, in an edition whose own title page says so. A line that entered print 134 years after its author died had no settled citation to travel with, which is how it ended up being reassigned to her famous novels.
Deliberately unclassified. The words are Jane Austen’s, written around 1792 by an author who died in 1817, so there is no author’s estate in any ordinary sense — but this text is not in the same position as the six novels, which have been in print and out of copyright for generations. Catharine remained an unpublished manuscript until the Clarendon Press printed it from the manuscript in 1951 ↗, and the United States rules governing a long-unpublished work first printed in that period are not something we could resolve. Rather than guess, quotle.info asserts no rights status here. Treat the quotation as short-extract commentary, not as cleared public-domain text.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Right author, wrong book
Nobody disputes that Austen wrote this. What travels with it is a citation, and the citation is almost always false — which matters, because a reader who goes looking for the line in the named book will not find it.
~
The source usually givenNorthanger Abbey (1817) Mis-sourced
The Biteback Dictionary of Humorous Literary Quotations (2013) filed the line under Northanger Abbey, as Quote Investigator records ↗ — an understandable guess, since that novel does contain Austen’s celebrated defence of novel-reading. But the sentence is not in it. The full text is a click away ↗.
~
The other book namedSense and Sensibility Mis-sourced
Quote-aggregator listings also file it under Sense and Sensibility. A search of the complete Project Gutenberg text returns nothing: the phrase “well written” does not occur in that novel at all.
✕
The "letters" claimOne of Austen's surviving letters No primary source
The San Diego Union-Tribune reported in 1997 that the line appeared “in one of her surviving letters,” per Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗. It does not. The Brabourne edition of the letters contains no such sentence.
~
Who actually says itKitty Percival genuine
The line belongs to a character, not to Austen in her own voice — Kitty Percival says it to Camilla Stanley while they argue about novels. Austen may well have agreed with her heroine, and Quote Investigator says as much, but the page should be clear that this is dialogue in a story rather than a statement of the author’s own opinion.
✓Jane Austen wrote it, around 1792, at sixteen, in an unfinished story called Catharine, or the Bower that stayed in manuscript until 1951 — the full chronology is here ↗.
Context
Why it mattered
The remark is a small piece of characterisation doing real work. Kitty Percival loves novels; Camilla Stanley affects to, without having read them properly. When Kitty says a well-written book always feels too short, she is separating the genuine reader from the poser — and Austen, who was sixteen and had been writing burlesques of bad fiction for years, knew exactly which of them she was.
It is also the earliest version of an argument she would make again in print. Northanger Abbey’s defence of the novel — anyone who takes no pleasure in a good one “must be intolerably stupid” — is the same position, twenty-odd years later and in her own voice. The teenage manuscript got there first.
A sixteen-year-old separating the real reader from the poser — and getting there twenty years before Northanger Abbey.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1775–1817 · English novelist · six novels, and three notebooks of teenage writing
Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire in 1775 and died at Winchester in 1817, having published four novels anonymously in her lifetime and two more posthumously. Long before any of them she filled three manuscript notebooks with burlesques, mock-histories and unfinished stories, written between roughly 1787 and 1793 — work she never prepared for publication and which the reading public did not see for a century or more. Catharine, or the Bower belongs to the last of those notebooks. It matters here because the juvenilia is the least-read part of her output and the easiest for a quotation to escape from: the sentence is unmistakably hers, but it was written by a sixteen-year-old and given to a character, which is not what a caption crediting “Jane Austen” usually implies.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
How to cite this page
Jane Austen, “Catharine, or the Bower” (written c. 1792), in Volume the Third, first printed from the manuscript as Volume the third, now first printed from the manuscript (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), where the story appears as “Kitty; or, The Bower”; readily available in Catharine and Other Writings, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Attribution and misattribution history: Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: If a Book Is Well Written, I Always Find It Too Short,” 8 April 2017, quoteinvestigator.com ↗.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘If a book is well written, I always find it too short’?” Last verified 13 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/if-a-book-is-well-written-i-always-find-it-too-short/