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6 posts tagged classic lit
Happy Birthday Charlotte Brontë, born April 21, 1816, died March 31, 1855
Charlotte Bronte believed believed art was most convincing when based on personal experience; in Jane Eyre she transformed her experience as a governess into a novel with universal appeal.
Read Jane Eyre, one of the classics of English Literature.
Happy Birthday, Mary Shelley!
Happy Birthday, Daphne du Maurier!
Born May 13, 1907, Died April 19, 1989Daphne du Maurier was an English author and playwright and is known most famously for her works which have been adapted into films. Some of these include
Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, and the short story The Birds (which was the inspiration for the Hitchcock film!).
To be fair, a substantial portion of the population might know nothing at all about Mrs Dalloway, and consider the topic prurient at the very least. Let’s start by acknowledging that Mrs Dalloway is a 1925 novel by Virginia Woolf, and was published 90 years ago today. It takes place in a single day in June 1923, although with many flashbacks to Mrs Dalloway’s past; her narrative is told alongside that of Septimus Smith, suffering from shell-shock after WW1.
1. Mrs Dalloway gave Nicole Kidman an Oscar
Indirectly, it should be admitted. Michael Cunningham used Mrs Dalloway as the focal point of his 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours. His novel incorporate three different lives in some way connected with the novel, one of which is Virginia Woolf herself. When the film adaptation was made in 2002, Nicole Kidman played Woolf – and was named Best Actress at the 2002 Academy Awards.
2. And Cunningham stole that title
Sort of. It would probably be fairer to call it an homage. Woolf’s working title for Mrs Dalloway was The Hours. These hours are an important theme in the novel; it is not divided into chapters, but there are twelve section breaks that correlate with the bell of Big Ben (the clock tower of London’s Houses of Parliament) chiming the hours.
3. Mrs Dalloway wasn’t Mrs Dalloway’s first appearance
Although she is elevated to eponymous status for Mrs Dalloway, Mrs D and her husband actually appeared as minor characters in Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). This work is stylistically much less experimental than her later novels. Mrs Dalloway also appeared in five short stories, later collected as Mrs Dalloway’s Party.
4. Mrs Dalloway quoted in the OED
Mrs Dalloway is quoted to illustrate fifty words in the Oxford English Dictionary, and currently provides the first-known evidence for four: sea-salted, wind-wrinkled, leaf-encumbered, and veneratingly.
5. Virginia Woolf didn’t write Mrs Dalloway
OK, that’s more sensational than it sounds. It’s just a roundabout way of saying that Virginia Woolf’s first name wasn’t actually Virginia – which was actually her middle name. If she hadn’t decided to opt for that moniker, Mrs Dalloway may well have appeared under her original first name, Adeline.
Image: Virginia Woolf, 1927. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Memorable Animal From Literature
[via Electic Lit]
When looking back on what characters have stayed with us the most over the years, there’s no denying that some of the most prominent ones aren’t even human. From a white whale out for blood to a tail-bouncing tiger, check out this infographic from www.helpucover.co.uk/ of unforgettable animals from your favorite books.
“If there’s a place where the dead watch the living, would Fitzgerald be pleased to know he made something so enduring, a touchstone that outlasts even its readers’ memories of it?”
– National Book Award Finalist Anthony Doerr and some other great writers share memories of reading (and rereading) The Great Gatsby. (Via)