Mar 13 2017
The British Library published an article last week suggesting that Jane Austen, who died in 1817 aged 41 in 1817, was killed by arsenic poisoning.
Previous causes of her death have thought to have been either cancer or an adrenal disorder but an article published on the British Library's website proposes arsenic as a credible cause - not due to foul play but likely from a tainted water supply or a medicinal mix-up.
The clues leading to the hypothesis include a series of increasingly strong reading glasses that were donated to the library in 1999 by a descendant of Austen, and the author's own writing in which she complained of skin discoloration ("black & white & every wrong colour"), both of which could be symptoms of accumulating arsenic in the body.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
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