Revision – Page 2 – Interesting Literature

Five Fascinating Facts about Philip Larkin

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

1. Philip Larkin wrote a number of stories featuring girls at boarding school.

While he was completing his English degree at St John’s College, Oxford in 1943, Larkin started writing stories and poems – and even a whole novella, Trouble at Willow Gables – under the pseudonym Brunette Coleman. The stories very much parody girls’ boarding-school stories of the time, which Larkin considered too flat and passionless when it came to treating the awakening of romantic and erotic feelings (specifically, homoerotic feelings) in adolescent girls.

Five Fascinating Facts about D. H. Lawrence

The life of D. H. Lawrence, told through five interesting pieces of biographical trivia

1. He wrote a story about Jesus Christ called ‘The Escaped Cock’. This story, also sometimes published under the title ‘The Man Who Died’, was summarised by Lawrence himself as follows: ‘I wrote a story of the Resurrection, where Jesus gets up and feels very sick about everything, and can’t stand the old crowd any more – so cuts out – and as he heals up, he begins to find what an astonishing place the phenomenal world is, far more marvellous than any salvation or heaven’. In fact, the story ends with a last line that would be made more famous by another writer, Margaret Mitchell: ‘Tomorrow is another day.’

Five Fascinating Facts about Cymbeline

A short summary of the main facts surrounding Shakespeare’s neglected late play

1. Samuel Johnson wasn’t impressed by Cymbeline. The eighteenth-century critic, poet, and lexicographer dismissed its ‘unresisting imbecility’, while George Bernard Shaw (who liked All’s Well That Ends Well, at least as much as Shaw liked any Shakespeare) called it ‘stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order’. Shaw would rewrite the ending of the play in his short work Cymbeline Refinished. Henry James, in 1896, was kinder: ‘The thing is a florid fairy-tale, of a construction so loose and unpropped that it can scarce be said to stand upright at all, and of a psychological sketchiness that never touches firm ground, but plays, at its better times, with an indifferent shake of golden locks, in the high, sunny air of delightful poetry.’

The Best Literature Quiz

The best and most fiendishly difficult literature quiz – can you answer all the questions?

We’ve put together an interesting literature quiz – and we think it’s the best literature quiz around (but then we would say that). It might be considered a long-awaited sequel (long-awaited by whom we’re not sure) to our ‘true or false’ quiz compiled for April Fools’ Day in 2014. Below are 20 questions, each of which is accompanied by three possible answers. There, it’s a multiple-choice quiz – surely it can’t be that difficult! But beware: there may be a few traps waiting for the unsuspecting book fan. Indeed, virtually every question is potentially a trick question, so tread carefully…

The answers to the quiz can be found here.

1. The word ‘trilby’, ultimately derived from the name of the title character of an 1894 novel, originally referred to which of these?

a) A hat

b) Shoes

c) Feet

Five Fascinating Facts about Margaret Atwood

Fun facts about Margaret Atwood, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale

1. Atwood has had a record number of nominations for the Booker Prize. The Canadian novelist has been nominated five times for the prestigious award, and on one of those occasions, Atwood won the coveted prize, for The Blind Assassin. Her 2009 book The Year Of The Flood, a dystopian novel, reportedly infuriated the chair of the Man Booker panel so much that he threw it across the room. John Sutherland reports this in his hugely entertaining Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives: the book was hurled with such anger that it dented the judge’s bedroom wall!