Serendipitous Literary Connections

One of the serendipitous pleasures of wide reading is the unexpected connections that I so often come across as I read. For example, on 5/11/10 I posted about the author Fanny Burney, and a couple of days later on a standardized test my students were taking, there was -- to my surprise -- a paragraph about Fanny Burney's novel "Evelina." Another example: Yesterday I was reading in Vanity Fair an excerpt from Christopher Hitchens' new memoir, in which he mentioned how much he and his writer friends were influenced by the poet Philip Larkin, and today I started reading Anna Quindlen's new book, "Every Last One," and found it began with a poem by Larkin. I also have a special place in my heart for Larkin because he was the one whose praise of Barbara Pym's work brought her books back into print; I hate to think of not having known Pym's wonderful, wry, and very English novels.