Jane Austen

Jane Austen turned 250 in December! Happy Birthday girl! There were hundreds of celebrations around the world to honor the author, including the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting in October in Baltimore.

As a member of JASNA, Maryland I helped plan that meeting, and one of the things I did was create a timeline of Austen’s life.

Recently I was asked to speak about how I created the timeline.

[If you are interested in that talk or seeing the slideshow from it… send me a note below.]

Then I started thinking about how this would be a more useful tool not as a physical timeline, but as an online resource … and I created a Google Slideshow version of the timeline itself.

As you can see the timeline begins with the birth of her father, George Austen in 1731. It progresses thru the birth of all her mother and all her siblings.

The next slide shows her early life in Steventon. Things Jane wrote are below the line and get a dark purple dot. Things above the line include important events in the family, like Edward’s “adoption”, marriages (yellow), and deaths (red). When Jane’s father moved with the ladies to Bath, the location line changes color to orange.

The third slide shows the publication dates of her novels in dark purple below the line. Above the line we get more family business. Alas, Jane’s death is noted about halfway across the slide. But her legacy lives on… and so the timeline continues.

Slide four again show books below the line. Books about Jane, like her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh’s biography with a gray dot, and second editions of Jane’s books with lighter purple dots. While above the line we see that the red dots continue as her siblings and friends die.

In the fifth slide we see more editions below the line and our first media adaption with a play in 1935. Above the line is now devoted to important events and people that shaped what is now JASNA and the world of Janeites.

In slide six the plethora of media adaptations begin to take hold on Jane’s legacy. The first television adaptation took place in 1938! Above the line we see that Jane Austen’s House, the cottage in Chawton where she finished her “big six” opened as a museum in 1949. We also see that JASNA began in 1979.

You can see in slide seven how 1995 was the year that Jane Austen exploded on the popular scene. With movies and television series regularly delighting viewers for the next several decades. In 2012 the VLOGosphere entered the fray with The Lizzie Bennet Diaries that brought the Bennet sisters to Southern California and whole new audience to Austen’s books.

And on it goes with new plays, TV and movie adaptions bringing us into Austen’s 250th.

[If you are interested in seeing the full slideshow / timeline send me a note below.]

Throughout the slideshow you’ll be able to click on the tags at the bottom of the photos and link to more information about what interest you.

This blog and the Jane Austen timeline is free to use, but remains the intellectual property of the creator. The images on the timeline are property of the institutions indicated by their links. Permission is NOT given to copy the images or the timeline with out express permission. Thank you.