blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

Elizabeth Gaskell was a woman ahead of her time. Her writing won the admiration of people like Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Eliot Norton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others. Like modern professionals, Gaskell and her husband often lived separate lives in order to accommodate their own vocations. However, both were supportive and involved in the other's career. At the time of her death in 1865, the literary magazine The Athenaeum described her as, "if not the most popular, with small question, the most powerful and finished novelist of an epoch singularly rich in female novelists." Here are five interesting facts about this Victorian career woman.

It wasn’t easy for David Lean to bring Boris Pasternak’s twentieth-century epic Doctor Zhivago (1965) to the silver screen. Despite the fact that Lean had already won critical acclaim with previous films like The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Lean’s adaptation of the sweeping Russian novel came with difficulties and triumphs. For starters, the movie cost $11 million and took three years to make — no small amount of money or length of time for a cinematic feature in 1965.

In an early issue of Life Magazine from 1966, a reviewer described Lean’s film as one in which the director “flung onto the screen both the chaos and the compassion — the devastation of history’s onrush and its splintering effects on the people caught up in it.” To be sure, the feature closely follows the narrative of the Nobel Prize-winning novel. But do you want to know some interesting secrets about the making of Doctor Zhivago? If yes, keep reading.

Before Elena Ferrante, there was Grazia Deledda. Yet the considerable fame Ferrante has accrued in the past few years is likely eclipsed by that which Deledda had in her lifetime. Once infamous on her home island of Sardinia, she became a national treasure almost overnight. Deledda won the Nobel Prize in 1926, making her the second woman (and Italian) to do so. Visitors and reporters flooded her house in the following weeks. Benito Mussolini, who was just beginning to inaugurate fascist Italy, adored her. He even planned to present an autographed portrait of himself to the author, signed: “with profound admiration.”

Australia is a vast country with a long Aboriginal past and a more recent history of colonization and violence. Yet when we think of this region of the world, these aren’t always the topics that immediately come to mind. To be sure, many of us think of adventures in the Outback, waves crashing along Bondi Beach, or sounds emanating from the Sydney Opera House. Rather than focus on tourist tropes of the country, however, we’d like to offer you some reading recommendations that can bring to light the intertwining histories of this immense region.

Stevie Smith was a strange poet. She did not abide by any recognizable standard of seriousness in her writing. In fact, her work could be considered rather silly. Her verses veered into nonsense, and her language aptly imitated infantile speech. She drew cartoons for her poems, and fought her publishers hard to be able to keep them in her books. At readings, Smith doubled down on her whimsy. Some of her poems, she believed, were just meant to be sung. And sing them she did, performing them wildly to the tune of hymns and folk songs. Because of Smith’s artistic peculiarity, opinions about her work have long varied. This confused reception, it seems, is the price she has paid her veritable originality.

Between the World Wars, a “little world war,” as Time Magazine described it, took place from 1936-1939. The Spanish Civil War pitted the Republicans, backed by international leftist allies, against the Nationalists and soon-to-be-tyrant General Francisco Franco. You might know a little bit about the history of the Spanish Civil War and its significance in Europe. Both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany supported the dictator, turning the relatively localized war into a prescient event for the megalomania and political atrocities that have come to define World War II. As the Associated Press described it, the “conflict became a battlefield of ideologies . . . fascism against elected socialists and communists.”

How much do you know about the novelists and poets who not only depicted battles through language, but also fought alongside the Republicans in various regions of the country? From Pablo Neruda to Ernest Hemingway to George Orwell, let’s take a relatively quick guided tour through the literary history of the brutal war in Spain.

Although Ann Beattie had a happy childhood, she believed she was stupid. For this reason, she hated school, and even graduated from high school at the bottom of her class. She admits the only reason she took a creative-writing class as a teenager was so she could skip gym. She never imagined she would become a writer. Boy, was she wrong.

Alison Lurie has written on a wide range of topics; everything from architecture, to children's literature, to fashion. She is best known for her socially satirical novels, which are often compared to those of Jane Austen. Her novel Foreign Affairs, won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Despite her acclaim as a writer of fiction she says, "I don't know that many stories that I want to tell. So in between the stories I just talk." She said in a 2014 interview with National Geographic, "Throughout my whole adult life I've written fiction and nonfiction. And when I can't think of a good idea for a novel, I'll write about something else that I'm interested in. And I've got lots of interests."

What is the relationship between literature and contemporary Chinese politics? China has a long literary tradition, but works written in both Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese haven’t always been available in translation to Western audiences. As such, many of us don’t have as much knowledge as we’d like to have about the links between fiction and current sociocultural matters. Let’s remedy that, at least in part, by thinking about some of the greatest known Chinese writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the role their fiction plays in our understanding of Chinese politics.

Maurice Maeterlinck was a Belgian playwright and essayist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. If Maeterlinck’s name is new to you, as it may well be, it’s likely because his work is of an uncommon variety. What has certainly hurt the playwright’s longevity is that he chose to pick sides...and lost. Maeterlinck staunchly resisted the aesthetic tides of naturalism and realism, instead aligning himself with the aims and sensibilities of the Symbolist movement. The problem is, of course, that the realistic style has prevailed to this day, while Symbolism has ostensibly perished. Yet, Maeterlinck’s defiance of the dominant trend helped him to admirably explore his principle concern: What lies behind the mysteries of life?