He definitely had a thing about Jane Austen (see 9 here). Mark Twain apparently wrote the following in a letter:
Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin bone.
You have to wonder about why there was an 'every' time if that's the way he felt. Anyway, the quotation is from a piece in today's Sunday Times on the contemptuous remarks made by writers about other writers.
I have a theory (for today) about this: about the fact, that is, that some readers can intensely dislike books that other readers love. It's not to do with - or not only to do with - literary quality in its various dimensions. A novel can be entirely unobjectionable from all technical or formal points of view, it can even be better than unobjectionable, and someone still may dislike it. This is because, like a person, the book has an overall character, made up not only of the quality of the writing, but also of the story or stories it tells you, the people whose lives it charts, the places it puts them in, the tone of voice in which they're treated, the sympathy or lack of it, the nuance or lack of it, the 'feel' of the book, the moral and aesthetic and pragmatic quality of the narrator's judgements, and much more. It all adds up to a kind of personality, and as in relationships with people, you can get on with one book and not get on with another, finding the second uncongenial, even taking against it, though both books are more than fit to hold up their literary heads as competent or better than competent fiction. Everyone has his or her choice and circle of friends, and so too with books. Hence my own impatience with the lamentably tedious Netherland, which had so enthusiastic a reception from critics; or with The Poisonwood Bible, a widely admired book if ever there was one.
To finish on a positive note, let me introduce you to a new friend of mine - Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. I hadn't even come across Stegner till I was pointed in his direction by my mom and my sister Sue. But I will certainly be reading more of him. Crossing to Safety follows a lifelong friendship, but between four rather than two people - Larry and Sally Morgan, Charity and Sid Lang. In my own reading experience, it is distinctive in that: tracing the contours and the complications of a relationship between two married couples over some decades, in a way that gives you a sharp sense of all four individualities and their interdependencies. It is a marvellous evocation of this type of friendship, and of human friendship, period. It's also perceptive on life as viewed from a late vantage point. And it tells a good story.