The Fabulous Originals
Potpourri
by.Knopf, $3.95.
A collection of short biographies find thumbnail sketches of people who served as the models for famous characters in fiction. Mr. Wallace has narrowed the field down to some twenty men and women who are not too well known and whose stories are, in many instances, decidedly stranger than fiction. Among them are Dr. Joseph Bell, the Edinburgh surgeon and amateur detective who inspired Sherlock Holmes; the governess, Claire Clairmont — friend of the Shelleys and mother of Byron’s daughter. Allegra — who became Juliana Bordereau in The As pern Tapers; Balzac’s Lady Arabella Dudley of Le Lys dans la Vallee—the truly fabulous Lady Jane Ellenhoiough, who, after a series of spectacular marriages and love affairs in Europe, spent her last twenty-five years as the wife of an Arab chieftain in Syria; Alexander Selkirk, the real Robinson Crusoe; William Brodie — upright citizen of Edinburgh by day; gambler, thief, and libertine by night who inspired Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and the originals of Madame Bovary, Captain Ahab, and Proust’s Baron de Charlus. Mr. Wallace’s excursion into literary detection and off-beat biography is an engrossing piece of work.