I was honestly surprised by the feedback that I received after I showed my presentation to our class. I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go when I first began my attempts on Voyant. I have always loved Jane Austen since I was a child and my mother gave me her edition of Pride and Prejudice when I was about 14 years old. I immediately feel in love with the characters, plot, themes, and story. Even to this day, I make it a point to read the story at least once a year. At first when I began my Voyant assignment, I was just going to use that book. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted it to be a collaboration of Austen’s novels. So I decided to add Emma and Sense and Sensibility into the mix.

I think that the difference in characters, social classes, and themes would give me a wider range of themes to look for in the novels. In Emma, she comes from a wealthy family and focuses more on using her higher level of society to help the people around her to find them relationships. Her focus in the story was more to be a matchmaker, rather than for her to fall in love herself. The themes of love and marriage were still there, but they were for others, rather than her as a main character.

Sense and Sensibility had a focus on the Dashwood sisters who went from relative wealth to a much lower standing in a short time after their father’s death. They needed to learn about themselves given this change of status and how to embrace their new living style. They also wanted to marry for love rather than for money. I think that their change opened their eyes to see what was more important in life, especially with who they fall for. I think that out of these three texts, this is the most emotional of them.

I was happy that my peers enjoyed my Voyant presentation and were interested in what I chose to show them. I would love to continue on in this project and have the time to discover what else I can uncover from the texts that are nearly 200 years old. I plan to take my findings further and continue on in my research, and perhaps write a paper or have a larger presentation what I can show with the new finding I still have yet to discover.