December 22

In literary history

• 1880George Eliot died in Chelsea, seven months after marrying John Walter Cross, who had leapt from their Venice hotel balcony into the Grand Canal on the honeymoon. She had published all her novels under a man's name; her gravestone used her real one.
• 1849Fyodor Dostoevsky stood blindfolded before a firing squad for belonging to a literary discussion circle. The Tsar had signed a pardon the day before; the whole execution was a rehearsal for a lesson in gratitude, and it worked.
• 1989Samuel Beckett died in a Paris hospital, twenty years after hiding from his own Nobel Prize and five months after burying his wife Suzanne, who had called the prize a catastrophe. The man who wrote best about waiting had at last run out of it.

Writers born on December 22

• Jean Racine (1639)

The Daily Canon for December 22

Phèdre by Jean Racine (1677).