Playing around with Google ngrams, you can undertake an analysis of key-words across all of the books scanned by Google. The graph analysis below shows the enduring popularity of Austen in the English language, compared to some French writers (Balzac,Flaubert,Proust and Stendhal):
Google Book Ngram for this Graph on selected authors
The graph becomes interesting when you compare these authors restricting the dataset to only French works. Proust is now the clear top referenced author, although Balzac was again as popular as in the English only dataset, Austen flatlines on the floor of Francophone culture. Not sure what this proves, but I’m tempted to carry out further research on all the Novelists on the list, just to determine the most referenced authors in the English and French language.
