(Source: nobodie-the-invisibleman)
30th January and in Jane Austen’s lifetime it was known in the Anglican Church Calendar as the Feast Day of St Charles the Martyr. It referred to the beheading -the regicide- of King Charles the First in 1649.
(Source: got-to-be-you-yesi, via bookbitesoz)
“Not keep a journal! How are your absent cousins to understand the tenour of your life in Bath without one? How are the civilities and compliments of every day to be related as they ought to be, unless noted down every evening in a journal? How are your various dresses to be remembered, and the particular state of your complexion, and the curl of your hair to be described in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to a journal?…”
Modern answer: Facebook.
The luxury of a frightened imagination over the pages of Udolpho.
An illustration by Charles E Brock for Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.
(via duchessoftime)
Frontispiece and cover for a 1909 edition of Jane Austen’s Emma, illustrations by C.E. Brock.
Tinted line drawings by H.M. Brock for Jane Austen’s Persuasion, 1898.
(via trockneblumen)
“To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love..” —Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice.
“We can dance if we want to
We can leave your friends behind
Cause your friends don’t dance
And if they don’t dance
Well they’re no friends of mine”
—Men without Hats. Safety Dance.
(Source: poshrebelgirl, via duchessoftime)
facebook for the characters of 19th century fiction
there are few occasions when the computer science wing of a university gets together with the english department. don’t get me wrong, the english department is an insecure scrounger all too eager to take over bits and pieces from every other discipline. marxism? sure! gender studies? why not? semiotics? gimme gimme! but one thing that english has yet to grab up is compsci.
and yet this paper manages to unify both fields in one amazing topic: using computers to extract social networks from 19th century literary fiction. from the abstract:
We present a method for extracting social networks from literature, namely, nineteenth-century British novels and serials. We derive the networks from dialogue interactions, and thus our method depends on the ability to determine when two characters are in conversation. Our approach involves character name chunking, quoted speech attribution and conversation detection given the set of quotes.
using the data presented in this paper, i mapped out the conversation network of the principal characters of jane austen’s mansfield park. the size of the oval is proportional to how often a character is mentioned (ie. their tumblarity) and the connection line weight is proportional to the conversation length. among other items, we can clearly see that edmund, despite fewer mentions, is clearly the central character of the book.
as i always feared, it was only a matter of time before our humanities professors were squeezed out of a job by a bad boy gang of robot scholars.
(Source: ragbag)
"‘And what are you reading, Miss—?’ ‘Oh! It is only a novel!’ replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda’; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."
—
Jane Austen, from Northanger Abbey
I also love how much she loves Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth, by the way.
(via aubade)