Author profiles

Ménie Muriel Dowie , largely forgotten travel and adventure writer, essayist and new woman novelist, stormed into the literary scene of the 1890s with her enormously popular first book, A Girl in the Karpathians...

AD was a sixteenth-century poet and translator with a passion for Protestantism, a feeling for the heroic element in religious history, and a fondness for acrosticss.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle , active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a journalist, novelist, and short-story writer, a scientific, medical, and spiritualist writer, and an autobiographer. His fame rests on his...

MD is a prolific, resourceful, and often surprising novelist and short-story writer, with a high reputation as a literary historian and critic. She is still widely identified with one of her early styles: the kitchen-sink...

JD is a shadowy figure, but seems to have been responsible, or partly responsible, for two remarkable works of different kinds: a feminist essay, 1696, and editing her husband's major scientific text, 1707.

DDB 's traumatic family romance made her a writer with an obsession. Her father's guilt and her mother's victimhood recur throughout her works: poems, plays, novel, legal statement—everything but her edited anthology. But she is...

DDM , who published throughout the middle years of the twentieth century, was primarily a novelist, though she wrote non-fiction—biography, plays, and screenplays—as well. Her work was adapted into film and television by such esteemed...

FID was a letter-writer and diarist of considerable talent, who reached print in both these forms when she was the only officer's wife to remain with the British army throughout the Crimean war. Her letters...

LDG , mid-Victorian translator, letter-writer, and travel-writer, published ten translations undertaken to help support her family. Her three volumes of travel letters were not originally intended for publication, and perhaps owe their honest style and...

CAD , Britain's first woman Poet Laureate, has published thirty books, which as well as poetry include plays, works for young people, and edited anthologies. Early in her career she began winning literary awards and...

MD is known primarily a novelist, in which capacity much of her work blends elements from history, biography, autobiography, or science fiction. She has also produced plays, poems, and scholarly works. By the early twenty-first...

SJD was a Canadian journalist, poet, and novelist whose work spans the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her writing generally features characters who fail to live up to their own potential, such as Lorne...

HD first established herself as a poet, but became internationally known as a novelist when she won the Orange Prize in 1996. A prolific writer, she also had considerable success with books for children.