#OnThisDay, 14 Jan 1963, Sylvia Plath's only novel, 'The Bell Jar' is published in the UK under the name Victoria Lucas. It’s republished in her own name in 1967.
#OnThisDay, 7 Nov 2000, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood wins the Booker Prize for fiction for the first time, having previously been nominated 3 times (including for the Handmaid's Tale in 1986).
She wins again in 2019, jointly sharing the prize with Bernardine Evaristo.
Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo congratulate each other on jointly winning the prize in 2019. Atwood is a white woman with white hair, and Evaristo is a Black woman with natural hair.
#OnThisDay, 30 May 2012, Madeline Miller wins the Orange Prize (now the Baileys Prize) with her debut novel The Song of Achilles. It is a retelling of the Iliad from the perspective of Patroclus.
The battle of Culloden was fought #OTD, 16 April 1746. It has, unsurprisingly, left a significant imprint in the literature & culture of Scotland. A short 🧵
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John Buchan called FLEMINGTON—Violet Jacob’s 1911 novel of the 1745 #Jacobite rising & aftermath—“the best Scots #romantic novel since The Master of Ballantrae”
The country smelt of blood; reeked of it. For miles and miles round Inverness, where the search for fugitives was hottest, burnt hovels and blackened walls made blots upon the tardy green of spring. Women went about, white-faced and silent, trying to keep from their eyes the self-betraying consciousness of hidden terrors; each striving to forget the peat-stack on the moor where some hunted creature was lying, the scrub in the hollow that sheltered some wounded body, the cranny in the hill to which she must journey painfully after dark with the crusts in her apron.
#OnThisDay, 14 Jan 1963, Sylvia Plath's only novel, 'The Bell Jar' is published in the UK under the name Victoria Lucas. It’s republished in her own name in 1967.
#OnThisDay, 23 Dec 1815, the much-anticipated fourth novel “by the author of Pride and Prejudice”, Emma, is published.
Jane Austen died 18 months later, never seeing her work published under her name. This wasn't that unusual at the time: women who wrote would obscure their identity on their work, even if their authorship of it was common knowledge.
#OnThisDay, 7 Nov 2000, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood wins the Booker Prize for fiction for the first time, having previously been nominated 3 times (including for the Handmaid's Tale in 1986).
She wins again in 2019, jointly sharing the prize with Bernardine Evaristo.
Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo congratulate each other on jointly winning the prize in 2019. Atwood is a white woman with white hair, and Evaristo is a Black woman with a 'fro