March 7: Poet James Russell Lowell arrives in London in 1880 to take up his duties as Ambassador to the Court of St. James on this day after three years served as Minister to Spain.

March 8: Here’s where that famous quote comes from: “Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.” The man behind that quote, novelist and journalist Gene Fowler, born on this day in 1890.

March 9: Virginia Woolf delivers her first novel The Voyage Out to her publisher Gerald Duckworth on this day in 1913 which coincidentally is the birthday of Woolf’s future lover Vita Sackville-West (the two don’t meet until 1925).

March 10: A fire breaks out on this day in Highland Hospital in Asheville, N.C. where Zelda Fitzgerald is a patient. The original flapper and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s muse dies after being trapped on the third story along with eight other women. She was 48 years old.

March 11: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is published on this day in 1818.

March 12: “You should have my soul to stand on if it could make you stand higher” writes Elizabeth Barrett on this day to Robert Browning in a letter from 1846.

March 13: Ghosts, Henrik Ibsen’s play which deals with syphillis opens on this day in London in 1891 a decade after it was first written. Critics were universally negative.