Below are three recent stories from Today in Literature; just click through to read them in full. The introduction to all 500 stories in our archive is available to all through our list of authors, but you must be a Premium Subscriber in order to have access to the stories themselves.

November 9		Shelley in Love
		On this day in 1816 Percy Bysshe Shelley's first wife, Harriet Westbrook, drowned herself. She and Shelley had eloped in 1811 -- he upper-class and nineteen, she the sixteen-year-old daughter of a tavern owner -- but then Shelley eloped with another sixteen-year-old, and Harriet saw few options: "I could never be anything but a source of vexation and misery to you all.... Too wretched to exert myself, lowered in the opinion of everyone, why should I drag on a miserable existence?"
November 8		Shakespeare, Potter & the Bodleian
		On this day in 1602 the refurbished Bodleian Library at Oxford University was officially opened to the public. Sir Thomas Bodley, a wealthy retired diplomat, made it his cause to restore what had been in ruin for a half-century, spending four years and his own and his friends' money to repair buildings and fill bookshelves. Sir Francis Bacon praised Bodley for "having built an ark to save learning from the deluge," though not all books -- including Shakespeare's -- were welcome aboard.
November 7		Janet Flanner, France
		On this day in 1978 Janet Flanner died. Her bi-weekly "Letter From Paris" was published in The New Yorker for a half-century, and then collected in the award-winning Paris Journal and other volumes. They offer a better and more reliable alternative to such memoirs as Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, from one close to several Lost Generations, and closer to France.