Robert Browning (1812-89) and Elizabeth Barrett (1806-61) had to marry secretly because Barrett’s father refused to let his children marry, even though Elizabeth was forty at the time.
The secret wedding took place at London’s St. Marylebone Church on September 12, 1846. (Browning was thirty-four.)
They lived in Florence for fifteen happy years until her death in 1861.
New Jersey novelist Edward Stratemeyer created the Bobbsey Twins, under the pseudonym Laura Lee Hope.
The Italian religious epic Jerusalem Delivered, written in 1575 by Torquato Tasso (1544-95), concerns the First Crusade, in which European Christians fought to regain the Holy Land from the Muslims. The First Crusade lasted from 1095 to 1099.
The animal in the 1865 Mark Twain story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is named Dan’l Webster.
Kate Chopin was born Kate O’Flaherty (1851-1904) in St. Louis, Missouri, to an Irish father and French mother. Her married name came from her husband, Oscar Chopin. Her fiction includes the novel The Awakening (1899).
The alternative title to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was The Modern Prometheus.
The group of writers and thinkers, the Bloomsbury Group, which included Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey, among others, was named for the place where they held their meetings-46 Gordon Square, in Bloomsbury, London.