Jane Austen died in 1817 at age 41, but how is a bit of a mystery. Now, Author Lindsay Ashford is arguing she may have died of arsenic poisoning.

We’re all Dickens all the time, here at BwB. This February 7 will be 200 since Charles Dickens, best known for having many of his work introduced by the renown G.K. Chesterton , and Julia Klein has a biographical summary based on Claire Tomalin’s literary biography, Charles Dickens: A Life. She says Dickens left his wife and family for a young woman names Nelly Ternan, an old claim that has been disputed more recently than in the past. Klein writes,

The award-winning biographer of both Thomas Hardy and Samuel Pepys, Tomalin writes with both force and sympathy about the moral difficulties this must have occasioned for Dickens. The marital rift was bad enough. But Dickens seemingly made matters worse by publicly vilifying his wife, Catherine, and shunning any friends who failed to take his side.

Perceptions of Dostoevsky are contrasted here with perceptions of George Eliot, both authors contemporaries of the other.

Dostoevsky’s writing is so unstable that it seems to be in a constant state of trembling. Almost every page jitters and quakes with all the anxious ideas and emotions struggling to take possession of the story. The young author who started as a colleague of Petersburg radicals eventually became a reactionary conservative, a Slavophil jingoist with semi-fascist religious views. In modern American terms, he changed from a Vietnam Era hippie into a Born Again Bush-worshipper with a regular rant-show on Fox News.

By contrast:

For George Eliot, on the other hand, Mill and Darwin and Strauss are crucial figures. Her intricate evaluations of their work helped refine her forceful and compassionate mind. She was heavily involved with the Westminster Review, which Mill had edited earlier. Throughout her career, she also joined in the debates over Mill’s On Liberty and his advocacy of women’s rights. She knew Darwin’s ideas early and well. Even before The Origin of Species, she had explored the scientific theories on which evolution was partly built.

I’ll have to think about the apparent bias in this piece, but that’s normal. I cannot criticize these opinion, because I’m out of my depth. (Sure–I probably shouldn’t say that.)