#CLiCCreative demonstrates how the CLiC Web App can serve as both a creative resource and an innovative research tool for writers of historical fiction. You can find out more about the overarching project here. In this blog post, we’ve provided a keywords guide to our Jane Austen Corpus for aspiring writers of Regency fiction who want to immerse themselves in the period. Themes include: emotional expression, social etiquette, the marriage market, and regency patterns of speech.  This post is also available as a handout.

Jane Austen (1775-1817) was an English novelist born in Hampshire, England. Lauded for her keen wit, strident social commentary, and literary charisma, she is considered one of the greatest writers in the English language. Though her novels span many themes, they are broadly devoted to the trials and tribulations faced by middle-class women on the marriage market.

Austen’s focus on the challenges and prospects Georgian women had to contend with was ground-breaking for its time and is of particular interest to modern readers.

Subjects like economic precarity, familial expectations, the limits of female education, and the pre-eminence of marriage are threaded throughout her novels.

Jane Austen Keyword Guide

The ‘keywords‘ tool finds words (and phrases) that are used significantly more often in one corpus compared to another. You can find the full list of keywords in our Austen corpus (generated using our 19thC reference corpus, excluding Austen’s texts) here. If you want to learn how to run keywords yourself, please see the keywords section of our CLiC user guide.

The following paragraphs provide a hyperlinked sample of these keywords, grouped according to theme. If you click on a word, you can run a concordance search for it across Jane Austen’s works.

Once you have selected a keyword you can use the ‘filter rows‘ option or the ‘KWICGrouper‘ to tease out or highlight any patterns you come across. Why not print-screen your findings and send them to us on Twitter under the hashtag #CLiCCreative, or by tagging us @CLiC_fiction?

Keywords Related to Emotion:

feelings, happiness, happy, pleasure, hope, comfort, hoped, kindness, cried, enjoyment, distress.

What can you learn about the modes of emotional expression expected of or encouraged by wider society in the Georgian era? What kind of social etiquette dictates the management of these emotions? How do characters understand their own emotions? Equally, how do they define or evaluate the emotions of others? 

Take note of the ways in which these words are used. ‘Cried’, for example, is generally used by Austen to indicate a surplus of emotions. 

Interestingly, ‘happiness’ is often used in reference to the future rather than the present or past. Collocates of the term include — promise, probability, future, again, near, possibility, would, arise, foresee and hope. For many of Austen’s characters, marriage figures as an all-powerful determinant in their pursuit of happiness.

Author: Rosalind White

Rosie White is a Research Fellow in Corpus Linguistics at the Centre for Corpus Research and editor of the CLiC Fiction Blog. She is a Victorianist interested in questions of materiality, and the growing field of research on the history of emotions. Her doctoral thesis interpolated between the history of science and the history of emotions, two interdependent fields that mutually orbit around the same question: what stories emerge from the past when we cease mining it for teleological argument? She co-wrote Pre-Raphaelites in the Spirit World: The Séance Diary of William Michael Rossetti (2022) and is also RA on the ‘Finding Middlemarch' project at Royal Holloway, University of London. View all posts by Rosalind White