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 […]
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. This was at his home at Gad’s Hill, in Kent. He also reputedly had […]
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 […]