Talk:Timeline of Jane Austen

message: * For more information and additional references relating to the life and works of Jane Austen, see the main article: Jane Austen. - This sentence will almost surely be deleted by others, as wikilinks make it redundant. That is why I had deleted it before. It also sounds a little too much like an academic book, I think. Awadewit | talk 17:50, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: *I'll remove it. Simmaren (talk) 18:56, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Copy editing

message: Le Faye is for scholars, although it might not be a bad idea to include a reference to it to point the way for those who need more detail. Do you have (access to)  the necessary biblio info? Are there other similar resources known to you that could be added? Simmaren (talk) 17:12, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: *All of the image pages say they are in the public domain. Hopefully that is accurate. :) Awadewit | talk 18:36, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: *That's sufficient, IMO. We're not responsible for policing it. Thanks for doing the work of checking. Simmaren (talk) 19:02, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  To do 

message: This timeline lists important events in the life and work of British novelist Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817), placing her life and work in their literary and historical contexts. Austen lived her entire life as part of a large and close-knit family located socially and economically on the lower fringes of the English gentry.Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1939), 2.  She was primarily educated at home by her father and older brothers and through her own reading.Le Faye, "Chronology", 2-3; Grundy, "Jane Austen and Literary Traditions", 190-91; Tomalin, 28-29, 33-43, 66-67; Honan, 31-34; Lascelles, 7-8. Her economic situation was comfortable throughout her lifetime except for a four-and-one-half year period of economic insecurity following the death of her father in 1805. During this time, Austen, her mother, and her sister Cassandra were dependent on other members of their family and had no permanent home.Honan, 213-14; Tomalin, 194-206.  
Austen's apprenticeship as a writer lasted from her teenage years until she was about thirty-five years old. During this period, she wrote three major novels and began a fourth.Kathryn Sutherland, "Chronology of Composition and Publication" in Jane Austen in Context, 13. From 1811 until 1815, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, published after her death in 1817, and began a third (eventually titled Sanditon), but died before it could be completed. Austen's realism, biting social commentary, and masterful use of such techniques as free indirect speech, burlesque, satire, and irony earned her a place as one of the most widely-read and best-loved novelists in British literature.Brian Southam, "Criticism, 1870-1940", in J. David Grey, ed., The Jane Austen Companion, New York: Macmillan (1986), 102. Her works critiqued the novels of sensibility of the second half of the eighteenth century and provided an early transition to the realism of the nineteenth century.A. Walton Litz, Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development New York: Oxford University Press (1965), 3-14; Mary Waldron, "Critical Responses, Early" in Janet Todd, ed., Jane Austen in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2005), 83, 89-90;  Joseph Duffy, "Criticism, 1814-1870", in The Jane Austen Companion, 93-94; Oliver MacDonagh, Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds, New Haven: Yale University Press, (1991), 65, 136-37.
Austen published all of her novels in the Regency period, during which George III was declared permanently insane and his son was appointed as Prince Regent. Throughout most of Austen's adult life, Britain was at war with revolutionary France. Fearing the spread of revolutionary violence to Britain, the government tried to repress political radicals by suspending habeas corpus and passing the Seditious Meetings Act and the Treasonable Practices Act, known as the "Gagging Acts". Many reformers still held out hope for change in Britain during the 1790s, but by the 1800s and 1810s, the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars had exhausted the country and a deep conservative reaction had set in. While Austen's novels rarely explicitly touch on these events, she herself was personally affected by them, as two of her brothers served in the Royal Navy.Janet Todd, The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2006), 13-14. When Napoleon was finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Britain rejoiced. However, economic hardships in the 1810s increased the income disparity in the country and class conflict increased. Luddites wrecked the machinery that replaced them during the Industrial Revolution while aristocrats prospered from the economic boom set off by the war.Todd, 14-15.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Awadewit (talk • contribs) 18:39, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: *I've reorganized, pruned and added two sentences re economic status. What do you think? Simmaren (talk) 19:30, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: *I've reorganized still further, putting the biography before the works, which is appropriate for a timeline, I think. Also, the works were discussed in two separate paragraphs, which seemed a bit odd. What do you think? Improvement or not? Awadewit | talk 06:42, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: *I've pasted in this version of the lead. People are reviewing this a lot faster than I thought! Usually it takes forever to get a peer review! We can keep revising, though. Obviously. :) Awadewit | talk 18:09, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: *The changes look good. There may be a lesson or two here for the lead of the main article. Simmaren (talk) 22:37, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lead revision 

message: Currently, the timeline doesn't have any significant authorial deaths on it - only publications. What do we think about adding these? Awadewit | talk 19:16, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: New style for the timeline

message: The 1780s heading is gone? What happened? I'm currently trying to fix it. I hate tables! Awadewit | talk 19:07, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: *Never mind, I fixed it. Awadewit | talk 19:14, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  What happened to the 1780s? 

message: Hi, I'm guessing that your note pertains to my additions?  I think I understand the problem, and I also appreciate your prestissime work finding sources for the Samuel Johnson and Lessing works! :)  But can I argue for a slightly more liberal criterion for inclusion, especially if a box has been left blank?
My understanding is that the goal is to place Jane Austen in the context of her contemporary history and literature, even if she wasn't directly affected by it.  if we agree on that, my own feeling is that we do our readers a disservice if we withhold helpful information from which they might be likelier to orient themselves in history, especially if we offer no equivalent information.
I've definitely tried to prefer adding British works to empty years (such as those by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Johnson and Robert Burns) rather than non-British.  (I definitely see that the Thelyphthoras are insignificant; it was just a neat connection with Cowper and JJ.)  But I also think it useful and good to include a few references to the contemporary literature of the Continent (such as Diderot, Voltaire, Schiller, Goethe and Lessing) as well as epochal musical works (such as Beethoven's 5th Symphony and Mozart's Magic Flute).  They provide a good context for Jane Austen's place in history and European literature of the era; I think you must agree, too, since Goethe's Faust was included before.  (Aside: the publication date for Faust is incorrect, I believe.)  With all respect for the works of Charlotte Smith, William Wilberforce and Edmund Burke, Beethoven's 5th and the Ode to Joy seem much more likely to be known to non-specialists around the world, don't you agree?  Doesn't it seem good and practical for our goal to have both?  Conversely, I don't see the point of cutting them in favor of events and works that few non-scholars will be familiar with — what purpose does that serve?
But perhaps I've misunderstood the goal.  If the scope of the article is restricted to the factors that influenced her and her writing directly, then we might indeed have to eliminate Beethoven and Schiller for lack of a reliable source showing their connection to Jane Austen.  But that goal seems overly restrictive; would we then have to find a reliable source connecting Jane Austen with every individual fact on the present timeline? Willow (talk) 19:33, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: *I think there are several goals: Show Austen's milieu as she understood it (sometimes this includes familiar writers); show Austen to readers in a milieu they recognize; show Austen in a large historical sweep. I sympathize with your desire to include continental literature, and I left in as many as I could, but Austen herself was not influenced by many of those writers and I wonder if the timeline now suggests she kind of was (I don't know, I'm just asking). In the Timeline of Mary Wollstonecraft, I used to have many more scientific discoveries, but I was persuaded to take those out, as they were not directly relevant to MW either. However, they are just the kind of "broad historical sweep" that I had wanted to include to make history more than politics. Unfortunately, few people agreed with me on that. When I took that timeline through FLC last time, I really had to argue for the non-author columns - many people saw them as irrelevant or subjective. We, I think, are much closer in philosophy. However, I guess I am skittish now and am mindful of the criticism from last time. *sigh* Awadewit | talk 20:00, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: More liberal inclusion criteria?

message: *The draft of the introductory material Willow suggested may be found here: Jane Austen Time Line: The Guide for the Perplexed. I put it in my sandbox to allow us the freedom to experiment. Please feel free to play with it. I took my cues as to subject matter and scope from Willow's comments, which I though were excellent. The Introduction is more than one paragraph long, but I though subheadings would be useful to readers in finding what they need.  Simmaren (talk) 20:54, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: *Do you think we should try to integrate this into the current introduction or have a separate section? Awadewit | talk 16:51, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: *I think this should be separate, a new section after the contents box. I see this material and the lead as having different purposes. Simmaren (talk) 19:33, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: *Agreed. Awadewit | talk 20:18, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

text: *I'm concerned that it's too long - that is easier to see on my office computer which has mediocre resolution. On the other hand, approximately this much is needed to cover the necessary people, places and events. I can think of a sentence or two to remove (Samuel Blackall and Edward Bridges among the suitors, much as I like the substance - can these be added to the main article?) but not much more than that without compromising its function. But my viewpoint may be still too close to the thing. Simmaren (talk) 19:33, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: *I will work on editing it later today or tomorrow. Perhaps some judicious copy editing will help the situation. Awadewit | talk 20:18, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: *Now that I have drastically cut it, I think we might be able to work it into the lead. :) See what you think. Remember, we are going to have an entire page on the family. Awadewit | talk 01:20, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

text: *I'm behind, as seems usual these days. I will do my best to stay in the game. There is enormous competition for computer time at my house right now and I'm losing badly. Simmaren (talk) 19:14, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

text: *The edits to the Timeline lead and the edits to the Cast of Characters seem generally fine. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't describe them as "drastic." I've made one small change to the CoC. I'm not sure about the deletion (as opposed to some sort of shortening) of the material on Tom Fowle, Cassandra's fiancé. It is a JA timeline, of course, and there is the point that including Tom Fowle might confuse the reader, but Fowle does appear in the Timeline and Cassanda was so important to Jane that some mention of him in the CofC on balance seems useful, if only to keep readers of the Timeline from thinking Jane was engaged to him. Simmaren (talk) 19:14, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

text: *Your point about the JA Family page is a good one. We can eventually have a Main Article cross-reference for those interested in details. That will help. Simmaren (talk) 22:56, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Introduction

message: For some reason, I cannot add the ISBN (O582492602) for Gary Kelly's book. Can someone else try? Thanks. Awadewit | talk 16:49, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: *Done. Simmaren (talk) 03:03, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Oddness 

message: Awadewit: I'm sure you are correct that "ministerial" is correct and the reversion is fine if the term I used was not. My change was motivated by a concern that "ministerial" might not be understood by "the average reader not a specialist in the field" and might attract undue attention at FLR. It is a somewhat technical term of politics (it has an even more specialized meaning in my own professional field - perhaps that's why it caught my eye). Is there another term that would do the job and be more accessible at the same time? Perhaps "government sponsored" or "government-backed" or "government instigated" would work. You know the history on this, so please make the call and I will abide. Thanks. Simmaren (talk) 19:35, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: *"Government-sponsored" sounds fine to me. ("Tory radical" sounded odd to my ears as "radicals" tended to be on the opposite side of the political spectrum as "Tories" at this time.) Awadewit | talk 00:26, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Ministerial

message: Why were the images removed?  They were a very attractive feature of the timeline. Mike Christie (talk - contribs -  library) 13:34, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Hello Mike, yes I think that was my fault.  As it's been nominated at WP:TFL I thought it best to tidy it up.. In tidying it up, one of my suggestions was to remove the (seemingly) random distribution of images.  Of course, this was just my opinion but User:Neelix has acted upon this suggestion and removed them all.  I wouldn't really object to them being replaced as long as the table will still be accessible.  My profound apologies about this.  The Rambling Man (talk) 14:23, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: No apology needed!  I do think they looked attractive; lists can be rather grey to look at and they both decorated and informed the reader.  Is there any layout reason that should limit the use of images in a list, or any accessibility concerns?  I think they all had alt text, for example. Mike Christie (talk - contribs -  library) 14:50, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: No, I don't think there's an issue with the images being there in terms of accessibility on reflection.  I'm not sure how screen readers deal with tables, text and images all together, but right now I don't see a good reason to not re-add them.  Sorry again! The Rambling Man (talk) 14:52, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: OK.  I'm about to have to leave where I am and don't want to do half the job, so when I get back to the house I'll revert to the version with images and see if I can redo any other useful interim edits.  Thanks -- Mike Christie (talk - contribs -  library) 14:54, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks.  I'd like to schedule it in soon as a TFL so anything you can do to ensure its quality would be gratefully received.  The Rambling Man (talk) 14:58, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Done -- it looks like the only missing change is the dashes, so perhaps you could rerun that script?  I'll look through the article again and fix anything else I see, but if it's like most of Awadewit's work there won't be much that can be done to improve it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs -  library) 19:28, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unexplained removal of images 

message: It might be useful to link to this article (even though it's incomplete), but I'm not sure where to place the link since Georgian already links to the general article. What does anyone think? Awien (talk) 00:19, 17 December 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Georgian society in Jane Austen's novels]]