Who the Hell Is Pansy O'Hara?: The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World's Best-Loved Books

by Chris Sheedy and Jenny Bond

The captivating stories behind fifty of the greatest authors and their most famous literary creations

Before Who the Hell is Pansy O'Hara ?, there had never been a single volume that explored the backstories of so many of the greatest books in the English language. A work sure to captivate all lovers of language and literature, it reveals in short, pithy chapters, the lives, loves, motivations, and quirky, fascinating details...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 014311364X
• ISBN13: 9780143113645
• Release Date: July 2008
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 7.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

What you didn't know about your favorite books

I like the trivia/gee whiz books that tell stories behind something. It is fun to learn about the stories behind some of the great books in our English Literature. I bought this book for my English teacher Daughter in Law who loves books more than I do. I did have to peek at the book before giving it away. It was great fun to learn the details behind the stories I have loved for years. It gives us something more to talk about when talking about the books.

Excellent Reference

As the other reviewer has written, this book packs a lot into its ~300-page length. In an easy-to-read format, you get the historical as well as the biographical context behind 50 masterpieces. A highly recommended read.

A Lovely shower

There are many books about books. "Why Not Catch-21?" by Gary Dexter is one of them. Harold Bloom's "Novelists and Novels" is another. "Who the Hell is Pansy O'Hara?" is one of the most recent book about books. It is different from the others not only in style, but also in content. Some will find it fascinating to have stories like Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" discussed in the same book that discusses Jane Austen ("Pride and Prejudice") and Emily Bronte ("Jane Eyre"). The authors include the Russian heavyweights, Leo Tolstoy ("War and Peace") and Fyodor Dostoevsky ("Crime and Punishment") - they tell us that Dostoevsky's book was accepted by the publisher only because Tolstoy grew fat on his previous success and had not written anything that year, and coincidentally, Turgenev, their contemporary rival, also had nothing to publish at the time. The unconventional mix of stories - I should now add, Jacqueline Susanne's "Valley of the Dolls", Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code, and A A Milne's "Winnie the Pooh" - may discourage others. Austen, Tolstoy & Shelley ("Frankenstein") have readers; Rowling, Brown, & Susanne have fans. They might not like to catch each other reading the same book. Secondly, this book stands out because it combines a discussion of the story and the writer in the context of its history, the writer's biography, and the reviews of the work. It is a literary "making of" book of books. Every work is a chapter and the book is divided into two main parts, "fiction" and "non-fiction". That is the third intriguing aspect of this book. In the non-fiction segment the authors talk about "Encyclopaedia Brittanica", and "Guinness World Records" as well as Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood". If one is looking for a scholarly work, he might prefer to pick up Bloom's book instead, where he will read Bloom's comparison of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in such terms as: "Jane Eyre", like "Wuthering Heights", is after all a romance, however northern, and not a novel, properly speaking. Its standards of representation have more to do with Jacobean melodrama and Gothic fiction than with George Eliot and Thackeray, and more even with Byron's "Lara" and "Manfred" than with any other works. Rochester is no Heathcliff; he lives in a social reality in which Heathcliff would be an intruder even if Heathcliff cared for social realities except as fields in which to take revenge." Bond & Sheedy write, instead, "Charlotte, inspired by her time in Brussels, penned "The Professor". Emily, influenced by the wilds of the moors, had written Wuthering Heights". Anne had produced "Agnes Grey", a story based on her experiences as a governess." Bond & Sheedy's effort, less profound in subject and analysis, is nonetheless full of useful information that are usually found embedded in a mass of other less striking information in major biographies. They tell about Erich Remarque and his "All Quiet on the Western Front", concluding with information