Here are some of the interesting things you may learn if you read John Sutherland’s Lives of the Novelists:
↓ that James Fenimore Cooper was expelled from Yale for training a donkey to sit in the professor’s chair
↓ that Evelyn Waugh once attempted suicide but was prevented from drowning by a passing shoal of jellyfish
↓ that Fanny Burney underwent a double mastectomy without anaesthetic and lived to write a toe-curling description of what it felt like
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