Former journalist Peggy Marsh had been quietly on the job on her novel for more than a decade when she was discovered by a publisher wHO was scrubbing the South for new authors. Starring a heroine named Pansy O'Hara, Marsh's manuscript was a theatrical, longing ode to the lost, pre-Civil War epoch in the Deep South. Its working title: "Tomorrow Is Another Day."
By the time the novel was published a year later on, in 1936, Pansy had become Scarlett, and Marsh had reverted to her maiden name, Margaret Mitchell. And her title famously had been transformed into the more poignant "Gone With The Wind."
This is just one of the literary morsels offered in "Who the Hell Is Pansy O'Hara? The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World's Best-Loved Books" (Penguin, $13 in paper), a digest of the little-known back stories behind 50 of the world's most renowned books.
"When you understand the book's history or something about the author or what influenced his or her work, you can't help only have a finer appreciation for the book, for the fine art work," Chris Sheedy, the Australian wHO wrote "Who the Hell?... " with his wife, Jenny Bond, said from their home in Sydney.
So Bond and Sheedy set out to write a playscript about books, to unveil shadowed truths by journeying through the authors' minds, lives, loves and inspirations. A broader knowledge of an source, they say, makes for a richer reading experience.
Among the works they investigated: "Pride and Prejudice," by Jane Austen; "The Hound of the Baskervilles," by Arthur Conan Doyle; "For Whom The Bell Tolls," by Ernest Hemingway; "The Cat in the Hat," by Dr. Seuss; Mario Puzo's" The Godfather"; Alice Walker's "The Color Purple"; and "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," by J.K. Rowling.
Readers learn that, once its pages were stacked, Mitchell's manuscript towered almost five feet � taller than she; that Vladimir Nabokov's " Lolita" was rejected by every publishing company to which it was originally sent; that for her "Bridget Jones's Diary" � conceived as a column � Helen Fielding used "Pride and Prejudice" as a template.
Readers likewise learn that Ian Fleming, author of "Casino Royale," was region of the team that cracked the Nazis' Enigma Code and that 20,000 readers canceled their subscriptions to The Strand mystery magazine after Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes in decree to concentrate on more than serious writing projects. He was by and by forced to revive the character for "The Hound of the Baskervilles," merely set the story prior to the detective's death.
Bond and Sheedy, 37-year-old self-employed journalists wHO have been married for 13 long time, came up with the idea during a literary conversation over dinner. Bond had once taught senior high school English and drama, and Sheedy, a former vice president of Guinness World Records, keenly appreciated the reading public's appetite for trivia.
So for 18 months of evenings and weekends the match began whittling down a list of dozens of contenders, then visited libraries, studied academic papers and pored all over the Internet in search of obscure and far-out facts.
Bond placid remembers introducing her students to her favorite book, "Emma," and how they had been moved by the story-behind-the-story Bond had pieced together about Austen's family tragedies, which included a handicapped brother sent away to live with another kinsfolk, another brother adopted and an aunt wrongly captive for theft.
"The realization was for me that in one case they came to recognise Jane Austen's back history, they began to talk over the reasons that Austen put her characters in certain situations and the reasons that characters reacted certain ways," Bond says. "The students looked deeper into the book as a exploit of prowess created by a specific and special person."
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