On July 18th two hundred years ago, at a house in Winchester, Jane Austen died at the relatively young age of 41. She had laid down her pen twelve chapters into her final novel (The Brothers, later published as Sanditon) in March of 1817, due to her worsening health, and it would remain unfinished. Her…
Tag: About the project
Nightmares, Ghosts and Ghouls: a spooky October on the blog
Happy 1st of October to all of our readers! This month, we’ll be digging into the dusty digital vaults of the British Library Labs, in order to bring you some of the finest in obscure and forgotten spooky fiction, folklore, poetry, and pictures. And believe me, there’s tons to be getting with – the Victorians…
Works in Progress: our collection
This year’s IASIL conference was fascinating and thought-provoking, as well as being a whole lot of fun, and I think we’re all still processing the excellent feedback we received! Many things to think about! One specific request we received was for there to be a list of the works that we’ve analysed so far. Which…
A Portrait of the Project: our official website is announced!
I’m delighted to announce that the Nation, Genre and Gender Project’s official website is now up and running! We created this site (in association with Vermillion Design) in order to showcase some of what we do here at Nation, Genre and Gender, when we’re not overthinking Jane Austen’s novels or identifying weird gender tropes in…
A Net of Influence: interreference between 18th and 19th-century novels
As a taster of the content that’s going up on our shiny new website, here’s an image that I put together earlier: This, as you can probably tell, is a draft version, but what it shows is a map of interreference between novels and novelists in our corpus. Writers, unsurprisingly, are generally people who enjoy…
A Workshop is Announced: Thurs July 28th, IASIL (Cork)
Apologies to our readers for the sporadic blogging schedule of late – myself and the team have been working flat out on the project’s fancy new website for the last few weeks! Our new site goes live next week, when we take this show on the road to the 2016 IASIL conference, at University…
DISRUPTIONS TO OUR USUAL BLOGGING SERVICE
Please accept our apologies for this last week’s complete lack of blogging! We haven’t run out of vintage insults or strange images, we’ve just been frantically working on a Big Project Thing. (Edited to add: this is the thing!) Normal blogging will resume as soon as possible – and once we’ve met our deadline we…
The 5 Least Important Characters in Pride and Prejudice
Two weeks ago we sent out a call to fans of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, to come answer a survey on how they rate the importance of the characters in the novel. And the results are in! While we’re not going to release the full list of rankings just yet, I can assure you…
Pride and Prejudice and People
Are you one of Jane Austen’s legion of obsessive fans? Have you read Pride and Prejudice once, or occasionally, or until the covers are falling off? Do you know your Sir Lewis de Bourghs from your apothecary shopboys? If so, we need your help! We’ve put together a survey which contains the full list of…
One Million Images: the British Library Labs Collection
*WARNING: CONTENT IS VERY DISTRACTING AND MAY INTERRUPT YOUR WORKDAY* Unless otherwise specified, the images we’ve been using on The Sea of Books all come from the British Library Labs scanned images collection. This is a project which is very dear to our hearts, as it consists of a massive, confusing and wonderful dataset, full…
What’s in a name? Waverley and The Sea of Books
The protagonist of Sir Walter Scott’s 1814 historical novel, Waverley, comes from a wealthy family and has the good fortune to be brought up with access to an enormous collection of books: The library at Waverley-Honour, a large Gothic room, with double arches and a gallery, contained such a miscellaneous and extensive collection of volumes…
The Sea of Books 