English novelist, poet and musicologist Sylvia Townsend Warner was born #OTD in 1893.
Warner initially trained as a musicologist and contributed to the Oxford University Press's Dictionary of National Biography before transitioning to a literary career. Lolly Willowes (1926) it is her debut novel and one of her most celebrated works, it is a feminist tale about a spinster who finds liberation through witchcraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Townsend_Warner
#OTD in 1891.
Maurice Maeterlinck's play The Blind (written in 1890) is premièred. Les Aveugles is, along with L'Intruse, one of Maurice Maeterlinck's first two plays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blind_(play)
Les Aveugles is available at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48368
In December 1876.
The first United States edition of Mark Twain's first individual extended work of fiction, the Bildungsroman The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, illustrated by True Williams, is published by the American Publishing Company. An authorised non-illustrated British edition has appeared in early June from Chatto & Windus in London (with the first review appearing on June 24 in a British magazine) and pirated editions have appeared in Canada and Germany.
"Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel."
Jack London died #OTD in 1916.
A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.
#OTD in 1816.
Percy Bysshe Shelley marries his mistress Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in London, after the suicides on October 9 of her half-sister, Fanny Imlay (by laudanum in Swansea), and on December 10 of his pregnant estranged first wife, Harriet (by drowning in The Serpentine).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley
Books by Percy Bysshe Shelley at G:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1529
Books by Mary Wollstonecraft at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/84
#OTD in 1899.
William Gillette's play Sherlock Holmes, based (with authorisation) on the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle, opens in New York City with himself in the title rôle.
Serialization of The Notting Hill Mystery by "Charles Felix" commences in Once A Week, with illustrations by George du Maurier; it is seen as the first full-length detective novel in English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Notting_Hill_Mystery
Danish author Marie Bregendahl was born #OTD in 1867.
Her first novel Hendrik i Bakken was published in 1904. She went on to gain fame with En Dødsnat in 1912, based on the death of her mother when she was only 12.
#OTD in 1915.
Albert Einstein presents the field equations of general relativity in the form of a tensor equation to the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_field_equations
General relativity at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36114
#OTD in 1856.
The first of George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life and her first work of fiction, "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton", is submitted to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine by G. H. Lewes for anonymous publication.
25,000 Images of Medieval Geoffrey Chaucer Manuscripts Are Now Online
By Regina Sienra
https://mymodernmet.com/geoffrey-chaucer-manuscripts-british-library/
Geoffrey Chaucer at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/144
#OTD in 1871.
First performance of The Bells starring Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre, London. The Bells is a translation by Leopold Lewis of the 1867 play Le Juif polonais by Erckmann-Chatrian.
#OTD in 1836.
The funeral of Czech romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha takes place on what should have been the day of his wedding to Eleonora Šomková, about a month after the birth of their child.
William Blake, English poet, painter, and printmaker was born #OTD in 1757.
A seminal figure in the Romantic Age, Blake's contributions span poetry and visual arts, often combining the two into illuminated manuscripts.
Books by William Blake @ PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/295
French writer Laure Junot, duchess d’Abrantès was born #OTD in 1784.
It was Honoré de Balzac who urged her to write her Memoirs, which he corrected tirelessly and which, once successful, she shamelessly denied he'd had a hand in.
#OTD in 1859
Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, an early example of mystery fiction, begins serialisation in All the Year Round.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_in_White_(novel)#
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Year_Round
#OTD in 1952.
Agatha Christie's murder-mystery play The Mousetrap opens at the Ambassadors Theatre in London's West End after a premiere in Nottingham, UK. It will become the longest continuously running play in history.
Who can claim Aristotle?
The endless battle over his legacy testifies to his great authority – and the power of his thought to make the world better
By Edith Hall
https://aeon.co/essays/dont-cancel-aristotle-we-need-his-ideas-to-hone-ours
In the Mouth of a Whale
Herman Melville and the watery beast.
By Herman Melville
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/animals/mouth-whale/?campaign=FE11LQA4
Books by Herman Melville at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/9
Why Did Shakespeare Write Macbeth?Shakespeare’s influences while writing this tragedy may have come from a variety of sources and events.
https://www.thecollector.com/why-did-shakespeare-write-macbeth/
#OTD in 1919.
The Großes Schauspielhaus opens as a theater in Berlin, with an interior designed by Hans Poelzig. It begins with the director Max Reinhardt's production of the Oresteia.
The House of Atreus at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8604
#OTD in 1899.
Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, a reworking of his The Wood Demon (1889), receives its Russian metropolitan première at the Moscow Art Theatre.
Is beauty natural?
Charles Darwin was as fascinated by extravagant ornament in nature as Jane Austen was in culture. Did their explanations agree?
By Abigail Tulenko via @aeonmag
https://aeon.co/essays/how-austen-and-darwin-converged-on-the-question-of-beauty
In December 1871.
Publication of George Eliot's novel Middlemarch in eight parts commences. The publisher John Blackwood, who had made a loss on acquiring the English rights to Felix Holt, was approached by Lewes in his role as Eliot's literary agent. He suggested that the novel be brought out in eight two-monthly parts, borrowing the method used for Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middlemarch
Middlemarch at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/145
In December 1925.
W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood meet for the first time as adults in London.
Through Auden, Isherwood met the younger poet Stephen Spender, who printed Auden's first collection, Poems (1928). Upward, Isherwood, Auden, and Spender were identified as the most exciting new literary group in England in the 1930s. Auden dubbed Isherwood the novelist in what came to be known as the Auden Group or Auden Generation.
