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Who really said it

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid

Written by Jane Austen 1775 – 1817 · English novelist
Verified Free to reuse

Spoken by Henry Tilney in Chapter 14 of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, written by 1799 and published posthumously in December 1817 (title page dated 1818). The exact wording is confirmed in the original text.

Last verified 8 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid” Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817), spoken by Henry Tilney

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Provenance

The source

Work
Northanger Abbey
Chapter
Chapter 14
Speaker
Henry Tilney (to Catherine Morland)
Published
December 1817, posthumously (title page dated 1818)

“But you never read novels, I dare say?” — “Why not?” — “Because they are not clever enough for you—gentlemen read better books.” — “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and most of them with great pleasure.” Chapter 14

Henry Tilney's reply after Catherine assumes he wouldn't stoop to novel-reading.

Read Chapter 14 at Wikisource

How we verified this

Public domain

Northanger Abbey was first published in December 1817, well over a century before the 1931 cutoff, so the text is in the public domain in the United States.

Fact-check

Often misattributed

This line is genuinely Austen's own writing and is correctly credited to her. The one nuance worth flagging is who, within the story, actually says it.

Popular quotation sites and merchandise context dropped

Often print the line as a flat Jane Austen maxim without noting it is dialogue spoken by the character Henry Tilney, not narration or a statement in Austen's own voice.

The words are Austen's, written for Henry Tilney in Chapter 14 of Northanger Abbey ↗ — confirmed verbatim in the original text, just delivered by a character rather than the narrator.

Context

Why it mattered

Henry Tilney says this to Catherine Morland after she assumes he doesn't read novels because “gentlemen read better books.” He answers that anyone — man or woman — who takes no pleasure in a good novel “must be intolerably stupid,” then confesses he devoured Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho in two days flat, unable to put it down.

The line sits inside Austen's broader defence of novel-reading in Northanger Abbey, a genre then widely dismissed — including by novelists themselves — as frivolous, especially for women. It is dialogue given to a witty, sympathetic character, not a narrator's aside, but it reads as Austen's own case for the novel as a serious form.

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”

Read the full story

Catherine's assumption — that gentlemen don't read novels — reflects a real prejudice of the period; Austen has Henry puncture it directly, and elsewhere in the same novel steps outside the story to mount an explicit authorial defence of novels as a form (the famous “only a novel...” passage in Chapter 5).

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Happiness Simplicity

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Northanger Abbey, Chapter 14 (full text)en.wikisource.org

Primary source containing the exact quoted line, spoken by Henry Tilney
Northanger Abbey (Project Gutenberg edition)gutenberg.org

Free public-domain edition of the full novel
Northanger Abbey and Persuasionarchive.org

Scanned edition of the original 1817/1818 four-volume publication
Northanger Abbeyen.wikipedia.org

Background on composition date, posthumous publication, and plot
Northanger Abbeyen.wikiquote.org

Collected quotations from the novel, including this line
Northanger Abbeyjasna.org

Jane Austen Society of North America overview of the novel's history

The author

About Jane Austen

Jane Austen

1775 – 1817 · English novelist

Jane Austen wrote six major novels — including Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey — that combine social comedy with sharp moral observation. Northanger Abbey, her wry send-up of Gothic fiction and its critics, was completed by 1799 but not published until after her death in 1817.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. London: John Murray, 1817 (title page dated 1818), chap. 14.

MLA (9th ed.)

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. John Murray, 1817, ch. 14.

APA (7th ed.)

Austen, J. (1817). Northanger Abbey. John Murray.

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid’?” Last verified 8 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-person-be-it-gentleman-or-lady-who-has-not-pleasure-in

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