JA became a Fellow of Magdalen College . Then an appointment in the Excise led to a distinguished career as a civil servant, working for a succession of key ministers of state. In 1717 he became a Secretary of State himself.

JA 's first job was as a librarian at the UN Information Centre. After that she became features editor on the US pulp fiction magazine Argosy (not to be confused with the British periodical The Argosy, 1865-1901). After that she was briefly an advertising copywriter for J. Walter Thompson . Later she worked for the BBC . But she held steadily to her intention of eventually becoming a full-time writer.

The son of a solicitor, he entered the same profession but left to pursue his literary ambitions. He wrote many historical novels. As editor or proprietor of Bentley's Magazine, Ainsworth's Magazine, and the New Monthly Magazine he published numerous women writers including Catherine Gore , Mary Shelley , and Catherine Hutton .

MA became through her writing the major provider for her family.

After studying in Edinburgh, AA was called to the bar and later served as deputy advocate. However, he is best known for his work as a historian, in books on European history and Scottish criminal law.

GA worked in England as a school teacher, but later accepted a post as the chair of philosophy at a college in Jamaica. After returning to England in 1876, he worked as a writer, producing works on science and social issues—many of them satirical.

In his early years WA worked in the bank managed by his father; then from 1846 he worked in the customs service. Best known as a poet, he also edited collections of verse and, between 1874 and 1879 the periodical Fraser's Magazine.

LAT worked with Polish refugees during the First World War, and was personally responsible for setting up the Polish Victims Relief Fund . For this work she was made a CBE.

He became a philosopher and a professor of aesthetics, and published a number of books including a study of Germaine de Staël . His best known work, however, was his diary. It exerted an influence on the thinking of (among many others) its English translator, Mary Augusta Ward , and on that of the young Susan Grosvenor (later Tweedsmuir) .

At the age of eleven, HCA began working in factories; he later became an apprentice shoemaker. Although trained as an actor and singer, he is best known for his work as a playwright, novelist, and fairy-tale writer. Mary Howitt was the first to translate his writing for English readers.

In addition to women's political progress, EA's second tour featured talks about a range of subjects: Lewis Carroll , Kenneth Grahame , and Edward Lear ; the historians J. R. Green , Edward Augustus Freeman , and James Anthony Froude ; the life and work of her grandfather, Thomas Arnold , and the analysis of religious tendencies in nineteenth-century European fiction.

The young PA was serious about her drawing and painting. She showed considerable talent and her diary records a high investment of time in these pursuits. She sold a pencil copy of a landscape (in a church bazaar) at eleven, and a year later began selling oil paintings through a Torquay sweet-shop. Her work was rejected by the Royal Academy at New Year 1947, but she continued to paint throughout her adult life and has held several exhibitions of her work in watercolours.

DA 's family moved to Bexhill, and soon after this Daisy followed her sister Vera to London, where Vera had enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art .

During the 1690s, long before her involvement with a charity school for poor girls, MA apparently hoped to found a community of serious-minded, self-educating, middle-class, single women, of the kind she recommends in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. The story is told that the future Queen Anne was inspired by Astell's writings to offer solid funding for such a community, but that she was persuaded against it by Gilbert Burnet . Years later Elizabeth Elstob wrote of the withdrawal of Astell's anonymous female patron. It is worth noting, though, that in a survey of the state of the nation which opens the second volume of his history of his own time (unpublished until 1734) Burnet wrote (after deploring the frivolous turn of existing boarding-schools for girls): Something like Monasteries, without Vows, would be a glorious Design, and might be so set on foot, as to be the honour of a Queen on the Throne. Either he changed his mind, or the story as it stands maligns him.

Literary historian Paula McDowell believes that MCA worked as a spy for the French government (as Aphra Behn did for the English).

He started his professional life in law but devoted most of his time to writing poetry and stories. Much of his writing deals with Scottish subjects, and among his best-remembered poems are parodies of his contemporaries. He also produced a novel, Norman Sinclair (1860-61), of which the early, autobiographical sections present a fine picture of Georgian Edinburgh. In 1845 WEA became a professor of literature at Edinburgh University ; he contributed significantly to the development of English as a discipline.

WB began his professional life as a lawyer, and later joined his father's shipping and banking business. He published numerous books and periodical articles on literature, politics, history and economics.

When she wrote her first play, Chains (produced in 1909), EB was working as a typist for a London firm. Over the years, she held jobs as a cashier, a stenographer, and a private secretary. She also held a position on the staff of The Spectator for several years. It was in her spare time from these jobs that she wrote her plays.

Before she was twenty she exercised her artistic gifts in making woodcuts, and sat as a model to her brother-in-law Burne-Jones and others.

Initially RMB worked in Canada as an apprentice clerk for the Hudson Bay Company , but he soon found himself trading furs and managing trading posts. The letters he wrote to his mother during this time were eventually published. After the success of his first volume, he continued to write, producing several books of adventure fiction for boys. He also illustrated some of his own works.

A writer whose rate of output is legendary, HB is best known for his series of linked novels and stories entitled La Comédie humaine, written between 1827 and 1847.

MB , it was said, sometimes served behind the counter in her husband's shop. It seems that for much of her life she was the family breadwinner.