By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Jilting of Jane’ is a short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946). It’s included in his Complete Short Stories, although according to the Wells scholar J. R. Hammond, its publishing history is somewhat sketchy: he tells us it was ‘first published circa 1894’, although where it appeared has apparently been lost in the mists of time.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
In my younger and bolder days as a university teacher, I was occasionally fond of beginning lectures and seminars with a new group of students by asking them a very straightforward question: who was the first female writer to appear on a British banknote? I’d then brandish an English ten-pound note as a potential prize for the first person who was able to provide me with the correct answer.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Diamond Maker’ is an 1894 short story by the British science-fiction author H. G. Wells (1866-1946). In the story, a narrator tells of his encounter with a man who claimed to have made diamonds artificially. Like many of Wells’s greatest works of fiction, this is a story in which the seemingly impossible – at least by late Victorian standards – becomes possible.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The origin of the word ‘tragedy’ involves wine, singing, and goats. More predictably, it involves the origins of theatre itself, back in ancient Greece. But in order to understand the etymology (or, at least, the commonly accepted etymology) of the word ‘tragedy’, we need to go back over two thousand years and take a closer look at those singing goats.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Beautiful Suit’, a short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), has the air of a fairy tale about it. Indeed, when it was first published in Collier’s Weekly in April 1909, the story bore the title ‘A Moonlight Fable’.