“Stella” was Esther Johnson, a woman Swift once tutored at the household of Sir William Temple in England.
Swift’s letters to Johnson and her companion Rebecca Dingley, written from 1710 to 1713, are known as Journal to Stella.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term “willing suspension of disbelief” in his critical treatise Biographia Literaria (1817). Coleridge used the term to refer to the “poetic faith” of a reader in accepting imaginary elements in a literary work.
In Green Mansions (1904) by William H. Hudson, Rima the Bird Girl is able to understand the language spoken by the creatures who live in the South American forests.
The source of the popular Disney film One Hundred and One Dalmatians was Dodie Smith’s 1956 novel.
The first published work of the poet and novelist Alice Walker was a book of poetry: Once: Poems (1968). She followed up soon after, however, with a novel: The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970).
Charlotte Bronte, the most famous of the Bronte sisters, wrote Jane Eyre in 1847. Emily Bronte, whose work is notable for its spirit of passion and rebellion, wrote Wuthering Heights in 1848.
A scrivener is a copier of legal documents.