The End, to Start With Thinking about the lives of my favourite authors often feels like an abstract exercise. Even more so if they are considered literary ‘legends’ – Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen – their level of prestige often elevates them to a point where they feel completely removed from reality, and it becomes difficult to consider them as real people who lived real lives. For authors further back in the past, whom we already have precious little information about, they become almost mythological, above the normality of life and death, existing mostly in the hearts and minds of generations of…