Rex Loves Jane

I think this is a great story and quote.I actually first read this back in the 80s. I was a big Rex Stout fan, but at the time was barely aware of who Jane Austen was.(Stout, for those not familiar, was the creator of the "Nero Wolfe" detective novels).

* * *
During the last years of Rex Stout's life, as his authorized biographer, I received numerous letters from well-wishers and, on occasion, not-such-well-wishers, offering me advice.

"Is it true," one of the latter asked, "that Stout has a secretary who writes all his stuff for him?" I showed the letter to Rex, then in his eighty-ninth year. He scanned it and said,

"Tell him the name is Jane Austen, but I haven't the address." ... Not long before that he had told me---" I used to think that men did everything better than women, but that was before I read Jane Austen. I don't think any man ever wrote better than Jane Austen."

It was no coincidence that, when I asked after Wolfe a few days before Rex died, Rex confided, "he's rereading *Emma*." Rex ranked *Emma* as Jane Austen's masterpiece. In the last weeks of his life he also reread it. That a book could be reread was to him solid proof of its worth. Thus it pleased him when P.G. Wodehouse, whom Rex admired, declared, at ninety-four, in a letter that he wrote to me, " he [Stout] passes the supreme test of being rereadable. I don't know how many times I have reread the Wolfe stories, but plenty. I know exactly what is coming and how it is all going to end, but it doesn't matter. That's *writing*."

As John K. commented, it's nice to see one's favourite authors getting along so well! But Wolfe's views were more ambivalent, as Paige E. pointed out to me: in The Mother Hunt, in chapter 12, Archie says, "Dol and Sally had been responsible, six years back, for my revision of my basic attitude toward female ops, and I held it against them, just as Wolfe held it against Jane Austen for forcing him to concede that a woman could write a good novel."

* * *