MC was running a milliner's shop opposite the Pump Room in Bath (in fact, she seems to have been there before the Pump Room, which opened in 1706).

After her mother's death, she kept house for her father.

Both husband and wife became deeply involved in charity work.

She was a talented and successful amateur painter, who provided sketches for the illustrations of some of her own books and made gifts of her work to members of the court including the Duchess of Kent .

Following the sudden death of her husband in December 1882, KC assumed the running of his general store and cotton plantation for more than a year.

After taking his degree in 1842, he remained at Oxford and was elected to a Fellowship at Oriel College . Religious doubts led him to resign his fellowship before he was required to take orders in the Anglican Church and subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles. He went on to publish volumes of poetry which are influenced by his religious doubt combined with his pronounced sense of social and moral responsibility. In his attempt to find a poetic form suited to the age, he experimented with the verse novel.

From about this time Colette was building a career of acting and dancing in French music-hall. Some of her roles involved mime, and for years her professional stage career ran in parallel with that as a writer. She often played parts in her own works.

She became Yonge's literary collaborator, her successor as editor of The Monthly Packet, and eventually her biographer.

After receiving her BA degree, LC did not want to teach (which apparently seemed the obvious choice for a graduate in English). Instead she worked for several years in her father's engineering firm in Leeds. She also did social work among the unemployed.

During the decade and a half following her degree, WC worked as a primary school teacher in London. She was at Portway Junior School from 1967 to 1969, then at Keyworth Junior School until 1973 and at Cobourg Junior School until 1981. At the last she was Deputy Head from 1980. During this time she took up educational journalism, and was arts and reviews editor for the newspaper Contact, 1982-84. She taught music at Brindishe Primary School , 1984-86.

RC returned to St Elphin's , and for three years she was a teacher at Darley Dale in Derbyshire. Then, because her mother had moved south to be near her now-married sister, she took a job at Bromley High School in 1917. Shortly after a severe bout of polio, she retired from teaching in 1924, and turned to writing full time.

BBBD was a woman whose talent and energy found many other outlets besides writing. She performed as a fortune-teller at a social gathering.Fanny Kemble in Recollections of a Girlhood remembered her as a society beauty, with a magnificent figure and great vivacity and charm of manner and conversation. She loved animals in general and (like her first husband) horses in particular. She was the finest female rider and driver in England; that is saying, in the world. Her artistic work, which was of professional standard, included drawings of animals and sculpted groups of horses modelled from nature, which achieved wide circulation in the form of plaster casts. Kemble judged these to be faithful in the minutest details of execution, and highly poetical in their entire conception. Dacre gave her opinion about an equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington in 1838. Fanny Kemble's eulogy nevertheless conveys a sense of discrepancy between Dacre's potential and her opportunities. Had she lived in Italy in the sixteenth century her name would be among the noted names of that great artistic era; but as she was an Englishwoman of the nineteenth, in spite of her intellectual culture and accomplishments she was only an exceedingly clever, amiable, kind lady of fashionable London society.

She worked as a clerical assistant before she began writing plays,completely in secret.

Before she began to make a living as a writer, SD held a number of short-term jobs, including shop assistant and usherette. She also spent time working in a milk depot and assisting in the research photography department of Metro-Vickers , a large electrical company.

CD bought a house at 95 Wandsworth Road in Battersea, near Nine Elms, then a slum area with a large Irish population.

AD taught English at Bushmills Comprehensive School , a Protestant school in County Antrim.

After her mother's death in 1866, EAD ran the family's household, which made her feel like a driverless steam engine, ready to run away or explode. She wondered if [she should] ever be in any way of use in the world.

In 1826 BD anonymously published his first novel, Vivian Grey. The book was a success and became the first in a trilogy. He continued publishing prolifically, and is remembered particularly for his novels in the condition-of-England genre. It is believed that the anonymous novel A Year At Hartlebury, 1834 (although he never claimed authorship of it) was written by BD in collaboration with his sister Sarah .

FMD served in the army until his early twenties, when he resigned to embark on a literary career.

Before his graduation SACD had already worked as assistant to a doctor in Birmingham and as a ship's doctor or surgeon on the Greenland whaler. Once qualified he returned to sea as a ship's surgeon (sailing to the coast of Africa) before choosing coastal practices: first a partnership in Plymouth, then a successful practice on his own in Southsea. When he made the ambitious move to London he failed to attract any patients, and decided instead to make writing (at which he had already had some success) his profession

She had decided while at school that she was going to be an actress. In Stratford both she and Clive Swift acted with the Royal Shakespeare Company under Peter Hall , who was setting out to duck the star system and build a permanent company by means of job security, community spirit, and excitement in the work. Those were great days at the RSC.MD understudied for Vanessa Redgrave this year; she also understudied for Judi Dench . She left her acting career and turned to writing a year later, when she became pregnant. As a young mother trying to write a novel in the evenings, she composed pieces for Mary Stott 's women's page in the Guardian, finding an affirmation of the importance of women's issues. As she became successful as a writer she began undertaking public service engagements to speak in schools and for the Arts Council and the British Council , but each invitation created a new domestic crisis, and I was always worried when I was away from home.

JD had his living to earn, and within a few years after leaving university he was working for the civil service under the Protectorate.