Mention any five things that the author found interesting
Answers
Jane Austen, one of England’s finest novelists, almost died at the age of seven. Both Jane and her sister Cassandra caught diphtheria while in Oxford. Thankfully, Jane’s cousin Jane Cooper sent a letter to Jane’s mother who rushed to her two daughters with an herbal remedy.
Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll was terrible at finances. Although he paid his debts on time, he would often overdraft upwards of £7,500. This is all the more ironic considering Carroll was a mathematics scholar at Oxford.
Mary Shelley started writing Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus when she was 18 years old. It was published only two years later.
Victor Hugo‘s Les Miserables wasn’t only popular with 19th century Parisians. This massive novel was one of the most widely read books amongst American soldiers in the Civil War.
Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud once attended a lecture given by American icon Mark Twain. The subject of Twain’s talk, however, had nothing to do with the intricacies of the human psyche. Twain’s central lecture topic was about a watermelon he stole as a child
Irish author James Joyce loved Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen’s plays so much that he learned basic Norwegian just to send Ibsen a fan letter. In addition to Norwegian, Joyce was fluent in French, Italian, Latin, and German. He even uses words in more obscure languages like Old English, Gaelic, Provençal, and Swahili in his most difficult novel Finnegan’s Wake.
Mark Twain was the next-door neighbor of Harriet Beecher Stowe in Hartford, Connecticut.
George Eliot was actually a woman. Mary Ann Evans wrote under this pen name because women authors were not as highly regarded as men. As George Eliot, Evans wrote several novels considered among the best of all time.
Not just a world-famous author, Vladimir Nabokov was also a serious lepidopterologist, or studier of butterflies. He was a Comparative Zoology research fellow at Harvard, where much of his butterfly collection remains today.
Before he made it as a writer, Salman Rushdie wrote copy for Ogilvy & Mather. He came up with several famous campaigns, including “naughty, but nice” and “irresistibubble!”