Grid: quarter-hour; meta: 5 extra
Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Finishing the Story” — Conrad’s writeup.
This week we’re wanting a personality from tales. There had been 5 starred theme entries:
- [16A *High-spirited woman who tells Mr. Darcy: “Your defect is a propensity to hate everybody”]: ELIZABETHBENNET
- [24A *Ghost who says: “I wear the chain I forged in life”]: JACOBMARLEY
- [41A *Pet about which Holly Golightly says: “It’s a little inconvenient, his not having a name”]: CAT
- [51A *Impoverished student who declares: “Man is a vile creature!”]: RASKOLNIKOV
- [61A *Socialite who tells Jake Barnes: “We could have had such a damned good time together”]: LADYBRETTASHLEY
We had 5 literary characters, so what was the following step? Jacob Marley was a personality in A Christmas Carol (ACC), and I remembered that Lady Brett Ashley was a Hemingway character. Quick Googling jogged my memory that she was a foremost character in The Sun Also Rises (TSAR). I had the rabbit gap: the initials of every literary work mapped to a grid entry with one letter ending the story:
WSJ Contest – 09.02.22 – Solution
- ELIZABETHBENNET: Ptrip and Prejudice -> PAP[A]
- JACOBMARLEY: A Christmas Carol -> ACC[T]
- CAT: Breakfast at Tiffany’s -> BAT[H]
- RASKOLNIKOV: Crime and Punishment -> CAP[O]
- LADYBRETTASHLEY: The Sun Also Rises -> TSAR[S]
The appended letters spell ATHOS, our contest answer. Solvers: which literary work unlocked the meta for you? Please let me know within the feedback.
