Nonfiction November 2025
Nonfiction November is an annual challenge hosted by bloggers Liz at Adventures in Reading, Frances at Volatile Rune, Heather at Based on a True Story, Rebekah at She Seeks Nonfiction and Deb at Readerbuzz designed to celebrate all things nonfiction. Helpfully, there are a series of weekly prompts to guide your posts.
This week’s prompt is hosted by Liz at Adventures in Reading who invites us to pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. I’ve come up with three pairs and, for good measure, there’s a link between the final two pairs.
My first pairing is M. R. James: An Informal Portrait by Michael Cox, published by the Oxford University Press in 1983, and Collected Ghost Stories by M. R. James, published in 2011. Cox’s biography of Montague Rhodes James, the celebrated author of ghost stories, describes his early life and his time as dean and provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and later as provost of Eton College. It also provides a picture of society and especially the academic world of the time. Collected Ghost Stories contains all of James’s published ghost stories, including many that have been adapted for television. (In 2024 Mark Gatiss, who has been responsible for some of the recent adaptations, presented the BBC Four programme, M. R. James: Ghost Writer.)
My second pairing is Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life by Samantha Ellis and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë. Take Courage is the author’s personal journey into the life and work of a woman she believes has been sidelined by history, overshadowed by her older siblings. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne’s second and final novel, is the story of Helen Graham, a mysterious woman who arrives at Wildfell Hall with her young son, seeking refuge from a dark and painful past. Helen’s secret diary reveals her struggles to break free from her destructive marriage to Arthur Huntingdon. Anne’s depiction of alcoholism and debauchery was considered shocking at the time but the novel is now considered to be one of the first feminist novels.
My final pairing is Daphne du Maurier’s nonfiction work, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë and her most famous novel, Rebecca. In her biography of Branwell, du Maurier describes how, unable to deal with the failure to sell his paintings or get his books published, he retreated into alcohol and laudanum resulting in his early death. (It has been suggested that Arthur Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is loosely based on Branwell.) In Rebecca, a shy young woman (who is never named) falls in love with handsome widower Maxim de Winter and agrees to marry him. When they arrive at her husband’s home, Manderley, she feels overshadowed by his beautiful first wife, Rebecca, (perhaps in the same way Branwell felt overshadowed by his sisters) who died in mysterious circumstances, and is intimidated by Manderley’s sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers.
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