text: Jane Austen almost died at the age of seven. Jane and her sister Cassandra caught diphtheria while in Oxford. Thankfully, Jane’s cousin sent a letter to her mother who rushed to her two daughters with an herbal remedy.
  Lewis Carroll was terrible at finances. Although he paid his debts on time, he would often overdraft upwards of £7,500. This is all the more ironic as Carroll was a mathematics scholar at Oxford.
  George Eliot was actually a woman. Mary Ann Evans wrote under this pen name because women authors were not as highly regarded as men. As George Eliot, Evans wrote several novels considered among the best of all time.
  Salman Rushdie wrote a copy for Ogilvy & Mather before he made it as a writer. He came up with several famous campaigns, including “naughty, but nice” and “irresistibubble!”
  J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of Lords of the rings worked as both a scholar of languages and on the Oxford English Dictionary before writing his bestselling novels.
  William Shakespeare‘s legacy survives not only in his many plays but also in his contributions to the English language. Did you know these phrases originally came from Shakespeare?
  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of the Sherlock Holmes series, had a very public friendship with master illusionist Harry Houdini. However, once Houdini heard that Doyle believed in spiritualism and thought Houdini had real magical powers, the friendship swiftly ended.