Talk:Agnes Grey

This article is written in British English, which has its own spelling conventions (colour, travelled, centre, defence, artefact, analyse) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

Agnes Grey was a Language and literature good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
November 8, 2010	Good article nominee	Not listed

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on October 24, 2010.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey discusses both issues of the fair treatment of governesses and the ethical claim of animals to human protection?

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DYK nom[edit]

I nominated the article for DYK on expansion, if anyone wants to an offer an alternate hook, please do so at Template_talk:Did_you_know#Articles_created.2Fexpanded_on_October_8,Sadads (talk) 05:18, 14 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comments[edit]

Here are a few points I noticed:

Lead

Charlotte Bronte is linked twice in as many sentences.
Governess is capitalised once, but not any other times.

Style

first sentence is completely unreferenced.
In the last sentence before the quote, it is ended with a comma but no quotations are used. Could a colon be used? (I'm not really an expert on punctuation, so I'm sort of asking about this one)

Genre - Autobiographical novel

The first several sentences of the last paragraph (describing the similarity between the book and her life) are unreferenced.

Those are the only things I'm picking up with my quick read. I suggest a thorough copy-editing before nominating for GA, as I corrected several grammatical/punctuation problems. PrincessofLlyr ^{royal court} 16:00, 15 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Sadads (talk) 16:02, 15 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I picked up the two lead problems and corrected these with a few other tweaks. Some other things I noticed

In the references change titles to either sentence or camel case rather than all caps.
Be consistent with the name order in the Sources cited section.
Be consistent with British or American English spelling. I was expecting British for context of article.

Keith D (talk) 22:28, 15 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keith D, sadads and I are both Americans. If you could convert to British spelling, it would be much appreciated. Thanks.Henni2me (talk) 23:57, 20 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have done a couple of spellings to British English. Unsure of the word fictious should this be fictitious? Keith D (talk) 00:24, 21 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That was a typo on my part, we looked it up. Sadads (talk) 00:27, 21 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Looking pretty good for a stab at GA now. Keith D (talk) 00:43, 21 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Passages in the Life of an Individual[edit]

Pinion is of the opinion that "Agnes Grey" "is almost certainly a fictionalized adaptation of Passages in the Life of an Individual" This referenced statement is odd. "Passages in the Life of an Individual" is an unknown work. As far as I know, no-one, including Pinion, can say for sure whether it was factual, biographical or fiction. The general concensus seems to be that it was working title for "Agnes Grey". If this is true, then Agnes Grey cannot be described as a "fictionalised adaptation". This needs looking into.

Amandajm (talk) 07:33, 24 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Some more comments[edit]

Amandajm! Fancy seeing you here. I have a few more minor comments - not really a review, since I added rather substantially to the article here, but I do hope they'll make the article better. This article is nicely written, but...

There are words such as doesn't and isn't in the article, such as ...but representing a character who in fact doesn't gain in virtue, which is usually discouraged. It should be does not. Done
Agnes Grey has a very "perfect" and simple prose style which moves forward gently but does not produce a sense of monotony. "Perfect"? As it's a quote, I believe it needs a reference.
Critics such as George Moore, suggest that Agnes Grey represents a style that "had all the qualities of Jane Austen and other qualities". Same here.
Cates Baldridge describes Agnes Grey as a novel which "takes great pains to announce itself as a bildungsroman" but in fact never allows its character to grow up or transform for ideological reasons. Direct quote needs a direct reference, once more. I'm also not sure about the fact that Agnes Grey represents ...a character who in fact doesn't gain in virtue. Agnes does seem to have learned more at the end. Hmm...

Done, I think. It was a little more radical position as far as I could tell, so I tried to make sure that the attribution was in the sentence and the ref at the end of the paragraph

However, Agnes stalls in her development because of the corrupted nature of the household in which she is employed and the ineffectiveness of the moral transformation, become a static member of the bourgeois, ambivalent to the Victorian value of moral transformation in virtue.[7] This sentence sounds slightly awkward. Is the moral transformation about her or about the people she is trying to help? And "becoming a static member..." might be better if the subject becoming a static member is Agnes.
The "Critical reception" section could be largely expanded, I think. If I can, I'll try to help. :)

There isn't a whole lot of surveys of the criticism, but I will certainly relook, make sure we are not missing anything. I didn't want to go off into the OR direction and the couple of works I read didn't give Agnes Grey an explicit verdict on Agnes Grey, instead they almost assumed it's relevance and then moved on to their point, commenting on the extreme position of Moore. Also, we didn't try ILLing anything, so if anyone has easy access to sources that would expand on what we already have, go ahead and give it a shotSadads (talk) 14:42, 24 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

F.B. Pinion agreed to a large extent that Agnes Grey was quite a masterwork but that Moore's examination of the piece was a little extreme and his "preoccupation with style must have blinded him to the persistence of her moral purpose" in the book.[11] This sentence sounds a bit too fast - as if it's rushing rather breathlessly along. Perhaps a few commas could make it more relaxed. Done

Great work, everyone, and I hope this helps. :) I look forward to what we can do on this article, which has a great deal of potential. Warmly, Clementina talk 11:41, 24 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

GA Review[edit]

This review is transcluded from Talk:Agnes Grey/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: -- Cirt (talk) 06:51, 5 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I will review this article. -- Cirt (talk) 06:51, 5 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Failed "good article" nomination[edit]

This article failed good article nomination. This is how the article, as of November 5, 2010, compares against the six good article criteria:

1. Well written?: Needs significant copyediting. Overusage of commas makes for long sentences, which seem to be awkward in nature, and could use copyediting for succinctness.

2. Factually accurate?: Concerns about amount of sources utilized in proportion to amount of scholarship available on the topic.

3. Broad in coverage?: Not thorough. Very short article, could be expanded quite significantly. Literally every single subsection on this article's page could and should be greatly expanded with additional WP:RS sources and reflective of scholarly research and literary criticism on the subject matter.

4. Neutral point of view?: Without representation of a serious amount of additional sources, not sure this is fully reflective of the sum total of perspectives present in secondary sources on this topic.

5. Article stability? No significant concerns regarding stability.

6. Images?: No significant concerns with images.

When these issues are addressed, the article can be renominated. If you feel that this review is in error, feel free to take it have it reassessed. Thank you for your work so far.— -- Cirt (talk) 18:56, 5 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

More references? Have you taken a look through what is available, I was actually rather surprised how little scholarship is available. Could you please specify which sources you would like to have seen? Sadads (talk) 23:47, 8 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]