“As writers and readers and critics, we English remain terribly proud of our conservative tastes. Every year the polls tell us ‘Middlemarch’ is the country’s favorite novel, followed by ‘Pride and Prejudice’, followed by ‘Jane Eyre’ (sometime this order is reversed). Oh, the universality of the themes. Oh, the timelessness of the prose. But there is a misunderstanding, in England, about the words universality and timelessness as they relate to our canon. What is universal and timeless in literature is need—we continue to need novelists wo seem to know and feel, and who move between these two modes of operation with wondrous fluidity. What is not universal or temples, though, is form.”
From Zadie Smith’s 2009 book of essays, Changing My Mind
