Euphemia Chalmers (“Effie”) Gray divorced English art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) on grounds of impotence.
Gray obtained an annulment in 1854 after seven years of an unconsummated marriage.
She went on to marry painter John Everett Millais, a favorite of Ruskin’s.
Longinus’s critical treatise On the Sublime was not published in Europe until 1554. The first-century essay was then translated into several languages and gained wide prominence, eventually influencing the poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Charles Dickens wrote two historical novels: A Tale of Two Cities (1859), set in London and Paris during the French Revolution, and Barnaby Rudge (1841), set during the anti-Catholic riots sparked by Lord George Gordon in 1780.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote “Water, Water, everywhere/Nor any drop to drink” in his poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). The lines are often misquoted as “and not a drop to drink.”
Thomas Hardy published his last novel thirty-three years before his death. Hardy’s last novel was Jude the Obscure (1895), the story of Jude Fawley’s adulterous love for his cousin Sue Bridehead. The novel so shocked readers that Hardy gave up writing fiction and turned to poetry. Hardy died in 1928.
In The Scarlet Letter, the father of Hester Prynne’s child, Pearl is the town’s minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, who is tormented by his illicit act.
Dylan Thomas died at age thirty-nine in 1953 in New York City after drinking eighteen straight whiskeys in a bar and lapsing into a coma.