COMMEMORATING JANE AUSTEN

Today is the 202nd anniversary of English novelist Jane Austen's death. She died in Winchester on 18 July 1817. She was only 41.

She was one of the first writers to pitch for women’s education and emancipation. With the publications of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. Her novels belong to the romantic genre, however, her heroines (Elizabeth Bennet, Emma) were shown to resist and reject patriarchy, ingrained in society. Oxford professor Helena Kelly said Jane Austen was not afraid to deal with touchy contemporary political and religious issues. That includes colonialism and the Church’s role in society, at a time (late 18th/early 19th century Britain) when they were not issues for public discussion, especially by a woman.
Read more here.

ANDREA CAMILLERI DIES AGED 93

"The memory of the aged becomes clearer and clearer with time. It has no pity."

Andrea Camilleri, the Sicilian author behind the popular Inspector Montalbano television series, has died aged 93 this morning.  His books won international acclaim and changed perceptions of Sicily. Read here.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

On 8 July 1822, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley died in the Tyrrhenian Sea. He was sailing back from Livorno, where he had met with Leigh Hunt, who had come from England to help with the publication of a radical journal, "The Liberal", to which Byron was also going to contribute. It is likely that an unexpected storm took Shelley by surprise, together with his friend Edward Williams and a boatboy, none of whom were particularly experienced in navigation. When Shelley's body was washed ashore and found on the beach at Viareggio, it was cremated following a quarantine, and his ashes buried at the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome. On his gravestone there is a Latin inscription "Cor Cordium", Heart of Hearts, and a passage from Ariel's song in The Tempest, a reference to the circumstances of his death:

"Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change 

Into something rich and strange."

REVISING ERNEST HEMINGWAY - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero (now in Oak Park), Illinois, Ernest Hemingway served in World War I and worked in journalism before publishing his story collection In Our Time. He was renowned for novels like The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, which won the 1953 Pulitzer. In 1954, he  won the Nobel Prize. He committed suicide on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho.

Here you can find my previous post on Ernest Hemingway and his works.

JULY

"To see the Summer Sky 

Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee"

Emily Dickinson