Tess’s name before she becomes Tess of the d’Urbervilles is Tess Durbeyfield, daughter of Jack Durbeyfield, a carter.
In the 1891 novel by Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, she eventually becomes the kept woman of Alec d’Urbervilles, a member of the well-to-do family for whom she is working.
Clifford Odets wrote a play called Paradise Lost that was not based on Milton’s poem, in 1935. The play was about the fall of a middle-class family.
In a letter written in December 1817 to his brothers George and Thomas, poet John Keats first referred to “negative capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats considered this quality essential to a “Man of Achievement especially in literature.”
The American Library Association awarded the first Newbery in 1922 to Hendrik Willem Van Loon for The Story of Mankind (1921).
Ahab’s harpooneers in Moby Dick were Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo.
Alfonso II, the Duke of Ferrara in the mid-sixteenth century, is the speaker in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”.
Charles Perrault’s 1697 French version of the tale has Cinderella wearing glass (verre) slippers, but his sources gave her fur (vair) slippers. Perrault’s alteration may have been accidental.