I'm getting quite carried away by this title malarkey - whilst I was picking my favourites, I realised that I also have a weakness for titles which are quotations from other books.The Comyns and Delafield titles from yesterday both are, but there are loads of others... and I want your suggestions! Here are the ones I thought of...
Told By An Idiot - Rose Macaulay
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Sound and The Fury - William Faulkner
There's Rosemary... There's Rue - Lady Fortescue
Hostages to Fortune - Elizabeth Cambridge
All Passion Spent - Vita Sackville-West
Well, that'll do for now - obviously there are lots more, but I don't want to steal the ones you're thinking of! Come on, do me proud...
I'll have to go and think on this one, but the first one that came to mind was Agatha Christie's By The Pricking of My Thumbs.
ReplyDeleteMalarkey! My mother used to accuse us of getting into too much of that all the time. :) Funny to hear it again.
How about The Romance of Engineering by Henry Frith. For photographic evidence that I haven't made this title up see here.
ReplyDeleteAll of the Mary Wesley titles. My favourite is Vacillations of Poppy Carew.
ReplyDelete"After Many a Summer Dies the Swan" by Tennyson's "Tithonus" by Aldous Huxley. I know that "Antic Hay" is from something but I cannot think right now. Also his "Doors of Perception" is from Blake.
ReplyDelete"The House of Mirth" and "East of Eden" are from the Bible.
I had a high school teacher who wrote a novel called "A Wilderness of Monkeys" (Merchant of Venice) and she said it could not be published because there was another book out there by that title.
Wot larks!
'Her Privates We' - Frederic Manning... remembered it was from Hamlet, but confess I had to look up the exact quotation:
ReplyDeleteGuildenstern: On Fortune's cap we are not the very button.
Hamlet: Nor the soles of her shoe?
Rosencrantz: Neither, my lord.
Hamlet: Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours?
Guildenstern: Faith, her privates we.
Hamlet: In the secret parts of fortune? O, most true; she is a strumpet.
Also (very downmarket) - the latest Jeffrey Archer, 'Paths of Glory', is from Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard; 'The paths of glory lead but to the grave.'
Ta da!
I have to mention Rosamond Lehmann's "The Swan in the Evening". For a long time I knew both poem and book but didn't link the two.
ReplyDeleteOr more recently there's Sophie hannah's "A Room Swept White".