I've read some Jules Verne, and also the Alcott and Dickens books you mentioned, but nothing else. Never got around to Twelfth Night in our school Shakespeare reading, so I'll have to give it a try one of these days.
I read a very interesting biography of Alcott a number of years back -- she grew up in quite the fascinating environment, in terms of being in the midst of all sorts of leading intellectual figures of the day. But her own life, personally, sounds pretty wretched.
It was interesting to learn that she pretty much hated having to write Little Women and all of those sequels, but needed to support her family, so....she was stuck going with the commercial preferences of the time. As for not getting Jo and Laurie together, I read that essentially she got *so* annoyed with what we would today call rabid fangirls begging her to do so after she published the first part of the book, she deliberately thwarted them in the sequel, just out of spite. LOL!
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branchandroot
Oh, these are some interesting ones!
Date: 2004-05-31 06:48 pm (UTC)I read a very interesting biography of Alcott a number of years back -- she grew up in quite the fascinating environment, in terms of being in the midst of all sorts of leading intellectual figures of the day. But her own life, personally, sounds pretty wretched.
It was interesting to learn that she pretty much hated having to write Little Women and all of those sequels, but needed to support her family, so....she was stuck going with the commercial preferences of the time. As for not getting Jo and Laurie together, I read that essentially she got *so* annoyed with what we would today call rabid fangirls begging her to do so after she published the first part of the book, she deliberately thwarted them in the sequel, just out of spite. LOL!