By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Did Geoffrey Chaucer invent Valentine’s Day? Yes and no.
St Valentine’s Day has been marked in liturgical calendars for centuries. As a Christian feast day, Valentine’s Day actually commemorates two Saint Valentines: Valentine of Rome and Valentine of Terni. (The Catholic Encyclopedia even speaks of a third Saint Valentine, who was martyred in Africa, but little else is known about him.)
By Viola van de Sandt 1. Jean Rhys got the idea for her famous novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) after reading a copy of Jane Eyre that her second husband had given to her as a birthday present. The first version of the novel was called Le Revenant, and Rhys burnt its manuscript after a … Read more
Curious Dickens trivia relating to his life and work
1. Dickens’s house had a secret door in the form of a fake bookcase. The fake books included titles such as ‘The Life of a Cat’ in 9 volumes.Â
This was at his home at Gad’s Hill, in Kent. He also reputedly had a series of fake titles called ‘The History of a Short Chancery Suit’ in 47 volumes (a reference to the very long Chancery case which inspired his novel, Bleak House).
1. James Joyce was born in the same year as another notable modernist writer, Virginia Woolf. But the similarities don’t end there. Both were born in 1882, but both writers also died in the same year, 1941. Both wrote landmark modernist novels, published in the 1920s, whose principal action takes place over just one day in mid-June … Read more