> If it is ideology, how do you explain that they changed a reference of Conrad to Austen?

Replacing male with female author.

Not just that. Conrad is pretty controversial these days in certain circles. Many people consider "Heart of Darkness" to be racist. I think another male author would have been passed over without remark.

But why did they choose the replace Conrad by Austen instead of replacing Hemingway or Kipling. Both Hemingway and Kipling are more controversial in certain circles (for Hemingway, cf. the Ken Burns' documentary, for Kipling, he is a jingo imperialist). As far as I know, critiques of Conrad were done in the 80's and never really stuck. So, no, it does not make sense: if they wanted to remove someone controversial, they would have started with Kipling, then Hemingway, then Conrad.

But they did not replace other reference to a male character by a female one. In particular, in the same paragraph, they did not replace Hemingway and Kipling (who are way worst in the "woke circle"). I feel that this is a good example that everything can be shoe-horned into a "woke agenda". They would have replaced Austen by Conrad and some people would have said "these woke had to switch to an anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist". If you read everything with the idea that there is a woke agenda, you will always find "reason" why what you observed is secretly part of the woke conspiracy.

The reference to Kipling was replaced by one to John Steinbeck, I assume because Steinbeck was a leftist, and Kipling is perceived to have been politically on the right (certainly he is relative to contemporary standards).

That's exactly what I'm saying: you are _assuming_ because you want to find a "woke agenda". On the other hand, Steinbeck is also an author that a contemporary Mathilda-like kid would read, while they would not read Kipling. This is the problem here: it really looks like that the equivalently probable hypothesis that it's not a woke conspiracy is totally impossible to imagine for some people, and this is a problem: they are deep in their paranoia.

I don't know if the reason is that Steinbeck is leftist or not. It is even possible that it is a woke agenda reason. What is worrying is that some people are just wanting sooo much for it to be a woke agenda, and the problem is that you can always turn everything into a woke agenda. If they would have replaced Steinbeck by Kipling, you would have said "it's because Kipling's books are talking about other cultures and Steinbeck talks about America, and for the wokes, it's bad to talk about America".

That being said, maybe I'm a bit biased, because so far, in a lot of cases, those moral panics turn out to be blown out of proportion: the "bad wokes threatening freedom" turn out to not defend the ideological position they are told they have. It may be the case here too: all this story may be just idiots who clumsily tried to keep the book relevant for what they think was the new taste.

>That's exactly what I'm saying

>they did not replace Hemingway and Kipling

In fact, they replaced Kipling.

they did not replaced Hemingway and Kipling BY A WOMAN. Sorry, I should have been clearer, but this sentence was completing the previous sentence.

At the end, it's basically what I'm saying: they replace Conrad by Austen, and one says "it's woke because they replace men by women", but they replace Kipling by Steinbeck, and one says "it's woke because they replace a man with a right ideology with a man with a left ideology". They would have replaced Austen by Conrad and one would have said "it's woke because Conrad was anti-imperialist". They would have replaced Steinbeck by Kipling and one would have said "it's woke because Kipling is more multicultural than america-centered Steinbeck".