AS was a poet, translator, and occasional critic who died at the end of the nineteenth century. Like her sister Louisa Catherine , she was chiefly interested in public and national topics.

LCS was a poet writing primarily on public and national topics during the later nineteenth century. She published mostly in company with her sister Arabella , though her one verse-drama appeared alone.

MES , who died in her twentieth year in 1839, became known for precocious writing in several genres: poetry, short fiction, science writing, and—the best-known of her works and almost all that survives—the diary of her formative years marked by the onset and progress of tuberculosis.

This obscure author, whose full name remains unknown, published at least four works at and just beyond the end of the eighteenth century. All her work, novels and shorter tales, either makes the claim to be translated from German or French, or is set in continental Europe. Her work is unpolished, with creaking, over-complex plots, large casts of characters, and melodramatic detail. But MS is of interest because she chooses, with some consistency, to write about issues which are both central and difficult in women's lives: of problems in marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. She strikingly anticipates particular elements in the work of more than one Victorian woman writer.

PS is primarily a poet, still active in the twenty-first century, though she has also published five novels. Her work engages closely with the female body: its power, its capacities, and the fear and unease it has traditionally aroused. She is probably still best-known for The Wise Wound, published jointly with her partner Peter Redgrove in 1978, a feminist treatise on menstruation and images of menstruation.

Through her work as model and muse, ES has been firmly ensconced as an icon of Pre-Raphaelitism. However, recent feminist reassessments of her visual art and poetry are reclaiming her as artistic subject rather than object. Jan Marsh writes in the catalogue to a 1991 exhibition of ES 's work at Sheffield's Ruskin Gallery , her artistic oeuvre is small both in size and range. But it was original, serious-minded and modestly successful, and deserves to be accorded a small but significant place in the history of Pre-Raphaelite art.

ES wrote early twentieth-century novels of which the earlier ones are ambitious and highly literary, the later ones in general longer and more romantic in tone, set within the confines and structure of the family. In examining love, or self-fashioning, or genius, she continues to highlight family and class responsibility and obligation. She also wrote plays for children (three published collections) and a biography of her aunt who was Principal of Newnham College , Cambridge. In 1923 ES collaborated on the translation of a history of France.

Irish nationalist and Celtic revivalist DS published twenty-two volumes of poetry (in which ballads predominate), as well as two collections of short stories, one of short sketches, a fairy tale, a nursery rhyme, and a novel. Some of her poetry volumes reprint writing from earlier books. Some of her writings mix prose and poetry, narrative and song: a form of lyricism reminiscent of traditional Irish story-telling. Much of her poetry laments the loss of Celtic culture, mythology, language, and literature, grief for the golden past of Kathleen Ni Houlihan (the glorified female embodiment of Ireland), and mourning for the deaths of Irish nationalists and for the devastation inflicted on Ireland's land and people by years of warfare. She also addresses gender and family issues, telling tales of women who sacrifice themselves for love or for lovers, while their men are generally unconstant if not actually false. Her prose sketches reflect her love of nature and animals.

LHS has been called the first professional woman poet of the USA. Immensely prolific, she published more than sixty-five books (didactic, educational, biography, children's, and travel books as well as poetry), and stopped counting at over 2,000 contributions to periodicals, annuals, and gift books. Late in life she commented, I think now with amazement, and almost incredulity, of the number of articles I was induced by the urgency of editors to furnish. Her very high contemporary reputation has as yet led to no real revival of interest in her work.

A writer of remarkable versatility, EJS was a prolific contributor to several major periodicals. She also published three monographic works (a series of thinly-disguised fictional vignettes, a lengthy essay on ethics, and a historical text) and penned her own fragmentary diary or autobiography. Her publishing career began during the 1870s and continued until her death in the early twentieth century.

EPS was a diarist and letter-writer whose opportunities as an early traveller and reporter in Canada at the end of the eighteenth century have made her writing remembered.

CS was perhaps best known during her lifetime as a prominent Edinburgh philanthropist, but as a writer she is best remembered for her Evangelical fiction aimed at young people or children, such as Modern Accomplishments (1836), Modern Society (1837), and Holiday House: A Series of Tales (1839). She also wrote three books based on her travels around Great Britain, as well as several advice or conduct books with a strong Protestant emphasis. Although many of her texts have heavy anti-Catholic themes, CS is ultimately remembered for didactic texts that still appeal to the child's imagination.

MS , a major figure in the development of Modernism, wrote more than two dozen works ranging from novels (twenty-one of them), poetry, and collections of short stories to polemical pamphlets, philosophical treatises, translations, biography and a personal account of war experience. She was also a well-regarded book reviewer and literary critic. During her last decades she published nothing, and almost dropped from literary consciousness.

ES was an important member of the modernist movement in England. She was primarily a poet and secondarily a literary critic, though her personal polemics, biographies, anthologies, letters, and autobiography all reflect her unique personality and power as a literary stylist.

FS published in a wide variety of genres, including devotional works and religious memoirs, novels, and poetry. She wrote regularly for periodicals. She was a well-known philanthropist and published many of her works to raise money for her favourite charities. Her most significant work is Hidden Depths, 1866, a realist novel about prostitution.

AMS is to all intents and purposes a one-work author. Her eighteenth-century epistolary novel, The Old Maid; or, The History of Miss Ravensworth, is vigorous and highly unusual; but any other work is still untraced.

ES was a popular novelist who published six titles, mostly with the Minerva Press , in little more than a decade, having begun just before the close of the eighteenth century. She sometimes intersperses poetry in her prose, which is supposedly the work of her characters. She is normally identified as a gothicist, largely because of Jane Austen 's treatment of her under that heading, but actually wrote didactic, satirical comedy as well.

After an extraordinary upbringing in 1960s South Africa, daughter of white Communist activists who operated underground, GS moved to England. She has published thrillers, literary novels, documentary or verbatim plays, and a memoir. Her strongest work concerns political struggle against misuse of power.

Beginning early in the twentieth century, CS published forty books, about twenty of them novels and the rest plays, children's books, and non-fiction including a polemical feminist manifesto and a book of memoirs. Her writing was only one aspect of her career: through her theatrical ideals, teaching, and practice (writing and directing plays and pageants, not all of them published) it connected with her work in the visual arts: embroidery, illustration, and social movements.

MBS published or co-published around fifteen titles in various genres: stories, novels, poetry, and books for children, besides her contribution to parliamentary reports about pauper schools. Her poetry makes accomplished and at times innovative use of dramatic and lyric form in its treatment of historical and contemporary material. Her work is distinguished by its sensitive depictions of women's struggles for independent lives and effective action, its acute dissection of Victorian gender conventions, and its positive representations of feminism and unconventional femininity.

Ali Smith is a contemporary Scottish author of fiction, drama, and criticism, remarkable for her love of wordplay and her exuberant writing style. Her short stories and novels contain many literary references, primed by Smith's background in academia, but also involve a fluid and far from academic approach to considerations of language, gender, and reality. Several of her works involve queer themes (a fair few of her characters, especially in her short fiction, appear genderless) and resituate the mythic, Gothic, and fantastic within modern Britain. Her latest works are especially noteworthy for their experiments with temporality.

CS , poet and novelist of the later eighteenth century, continued her output especially of children's books, into the very early nineteenth century. She wrote her poems for pleasure, her remarkable, now edited letters for relief from the struggles of a difficult life, but her novels (she said) only by necessity. Many of the latter have foreign settings, not for mere exoticism but to further a political critique which takes a global view. All her writing was done at high speed: she found it hard or impossible to make her income cover the unremitting expenses of her large dependent family. A critic has recently pronounced that the best of [her] writings . . . should be recognised as among the greatest works of the period.

Dodie Smith, best known for writing the beloved children's novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), began her career as a dramatist; she wrote a series of hit plays in the 1930s. In the 1940s she turned to publishing novels (including the best-selling I Capture the Castle in 1948) and spent her last years writing several volumes of autobiography. After the war, DS sometimes experienced difficulties getting her work published or produced; she fell out of favour with critics who found her work too sentimental, charming, and cosy, particularly in contrast to the work of Angry Young Men such as John Osborne and Kingsley Amis . Her biggest successes from this later period were with younger audiences.