Andrew Lang: Our Companion for Fairy and Adventure

     . . . .  Andrew Lang, editor of the multi-volume Fairy Tale series, labeled in colors, is the subject of a piece by Michael Dirda in the WaPo (pay wall). 

Why have I never thought of Lang, the person, and his life before, when I grew up with the fairy tale volumes, reading them over and over, in order!  Great Grand Mom had them all from her days as a teacher. She brought all the books they used in her classes at Teachers College on how and what to teach in English and history classes; she bought a lot of books for her country school kids as a library for that one-room school house that had none). 

Lang had a close friendship with H. Rider Haggard. He read King Solomon's Mines in manuscript and got it published. Haggard dedicated She: A History of Adventure, to Lang.

Lang wrote a good natured parody of She, titled He. Additional jump starts to writing careers for which he was responsible were those of Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson.  He championed Mark Twain in Britain, and so very much more.

He seems a great guy with whom to have hung out and whom to have as a friend.

His lecture on advice to would-be , "How To Fail At Literature", can be found full text online and is worth reading today:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2566/2566-h/2566-h.htm

So can be read his "Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody" -- in which Catherine Moreland of Northhanger Abbey meets Jane Eyre:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1991

or 

http://www.fullbooks.com/Old-Friends--Essays-in-Epistolary-Parody1.html

These are joyeous reads.

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Yesterday was Day 1 of Month 6 of isolation, as far as isolation can be maintained.