The most significant events in the history of books on the 12th of November
1615: Richard Baxter is born. This English Puritan theologian and poet was a noted hymn-writer – he wrote the words for the hymn ‘Ye Holy Angels Bright’ among others, and is mentioned by George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss.
1865: Elizabeth Gaskell dies. As well as her classic realist novel about nineteenth-century factory life, North and South (which features in our pick of the best Victorian novels), Gaskell also wrote a short story called ‘The Half-Brothers’ (1859) which features a collie dog named Lassie. Whether this was the inspiration for the series of popular films, even indirectly, is not known. If not, it’s a nice 
1915: Roland Barthes is born. This French philosopher and literary theorist is perhaps best-known for his 1968 essay ‘The Death of the Author’, a key work of poststructuralism, which questioned the neat, quasi-scientific approach to literary study which the structuralists had pioneered over the previous few decades. In ‘The Death of the Author’, Barthes argued that every text is merely a ’tissue of quotations’, the author is not a Godlike figure, and the true meaning of a literary work lies ‘not in its origin but in its destination’ – that is, the reader. Barthes’ own death would come in 1980, when he was run over by a laundry van and died of his injuries shortly after.
Image: Elizabeth Gaskell in c. 1860, author unknown, via Wikimedia Commons.
