Diary
John Bayley: Serious Novels, 10 November 1994
“... boat, the Ardent Spirit. When James gently but none the less patronisingly dismissed Jane Austen as ‘knowing no more of her process than the brown bird that sings on the orchard bough’, he forgot or ignored the fact that a highly skilled and instinctive artist may know very little about how his task came to be chosen, but a very great deal ... ”