a "twenty-page sex scene featuring the two principals, with Mr. Darcy, furthermore, acquitting himself uncommonly well."

so says Martin Amis. Writers on Jane Austen's enduring appeal:

Jane Austen– born a year before the American Revolution– remains a hot literary property. ATruth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen (Random House, $25), edited by Susannah Carson, explains her eternal appeal.

• Lamenting Austen's death at 41, Virginia Woolf reflects on how Austen's work might have evolved had she lived longer, perhaps becoming "the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust." Woolf calls Austen "the most perfect artist among women, the writer whose books are immortal."

• Writing about Pride and Prejudice, Martin Amis confesses that, having read the novel five or six times, he would perhaps relish a more detailed conclusion involving a "twenty-page sex scene featuring the two principals, with Mr. Darcy, furthermore, acquitting himself uncommonly well."

• Amy Heckerling explains why she set Austen's 1815 Emma in 1990s Beverly Hills in her 1995 movie, Clueless. "The book has the pace of youth ... fast, restless, and exuberant."

• Calling Pride and Prejudice "a pure joy to read," Anna Quindlen writes of her emotional identification with its heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, who is "so alive, so riveting, so much one of us, only better."

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