Message from the President: "Lovely and Amazing": Why the Heroines of Jane Austen's World Truly Are
Bibliographic record
Abstract
JASNA'S delightful and educational 2002 Toronto AGM, Austen's World, was sandwiched between two minor events in my personal life that, at first view, may seem entirely discrete occurrences and in no way related to Jane Austen. The first event was my reading in The New York Times of October 6th a feature by Tamar Lewin headlined A New Book, Featuring Another Spineless Woman, which began: Oh, where are the heroines of yesteryear? The strong, the virtuous, the impeccably competent: Anitgone, Nancy Drew, Jane Eyre. And most especially, Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Austen's model of admirable womanhood? ... concluded: Plenty of books feature tough women detectives, and contemporary authors, like Margaret Drabble. Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Smiley, and Toni Morrison, have produced a raft of novels with complicated heroines, who are neither pathetic nor laughable. But they don't resonate like ... Elizabeth Bennet. (section 4, p. 5) Lewin's article then examines the hapless contemporary literary heroines Bridget Jones, who needs no introduction to you readers, and Kate Reddy of Allison Pearson's Don't Know How She Does It, who undermines the 1990's phenomenon of the super mom, able to balance the perfect home, model children, and successful career. The second event was my seeing the widely admired film Lovely and Amazing, written and directed by Nicole Holofcener, about a mother (Jane, played by that fine Irish actress Brenda Blethyn, whose appearing in the film made me want to see it in the first place), her two birth daughters (Catherine Keener plays the elder, trapped in a marriage-gone-bland, but unable to pull her socks up, so to speak, and Emily Mortimer, as the younger, a wanna be actress, insecure about her body), and her adopted African-American daughter, who despite being insecure about her hair and only about ten years old, turns out to be the person with the best sense of self. I became so irritated by the insecurities, inadequacies, and inanities of the three women characters that I left the film calling it Lovely But Annoying. The objects of the two events, reading the newspaper article and seeing the film, are perfectly connected because the former bemoans that It is a truth universally acknowledged that heroines are now often hapless, which is borne out in the film. But where does Jane Austen come in--other than Lewin's tapping into Jane Austen's much-adapted opening line of Pride and Prejudice and the AGM's being sandwiched between the reading and viewing events? If I may beg your pardon for turning to the sandwich metaphor (similar to Wentworth's using that nut metaphor, which we all forgive--don't we? …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.050 | 0.015 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".