Writer George Henry Lewes (1817-78), who was officially married to another woman, Agnes, but unable to get a divorce, was George Eliot’s (1819-80) living companion.
Eliot and Lewes lived together from 1854 until his death in 1878.
The source of the popular Disney film One Hundred and One Dalmatians was Dodie Smith’s 1956 novel.
Washington Irving is believed to have originated the expression “the Almighty Dollar” in Wolfert’s Roost (1855).
Alfonso II, the Duke of Ferrara in the mid-sixteenth century, is the speaker in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”.
No, the title character in Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar does not have a name.
Kugelmass has an affair with Emma Bovary in Woody Allen’s short story “The Kugelmass Episode”. The Great Persky projects the bored professor into Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) and Emma Bovary into modern Manhattan.
Rubaiyat is the plural of the Persian word meaning “a poem of four lines.” The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur is a poem composed of such quatrains. The twelfth-century Persian poem was translated freely into English by Edward FitzGerald in 1859.