Charles Lamb's modest family origins included a father who was a servant and a mother who was the daughter of a female domestic. Though his parents bore seven children, only Charles, his older sister Mary, and the oldest boy John survived infancy. Charles was educated at Christ's Hospital, joining the East India Company soon after he left the school. During 1795 he suffered a mental breakdown and was confined for six weeks. In 1796, Mary also suffered a breakdown, stabbing and killing their mother.

The poets who for a time lived and collaborated in the northern English lake district, including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey.

La Fontaine's poetic Fables were drawn from eastern and classical sources. He updated the Cupid and Psyche story in Les Amours de Psiché et de Cupidon (1669).

German author of novels and moral tales, August Lafontaine was one of the most popular writers of his time.

French author whose best-known work, La Princesse de Clèves (1678), was initially believed to have been written by a man, with Bishop Huet and Jean Regnauld de Segrais among those proposed as candidates for author.

Character in William Shakespeare's drama Hamlet.

Elizabethan playwright whose The Spanish Tragedy; or, Hieronimo is Mad Again was among the most popular productions during its time, inaugurating the genre of the revenge tragedy. A close friend of Marlowe, Kyd was arrested in 1593 under charges of atheism.

An extremely prolific German novelist, playwright, historian, and political appointee whose political career was as controversial as his literary output. He is probably best known to English-speaking audiences for his Das Kind der Liebe, the play which, adapted by Elizabeth Inchbald as Lover's Vows (1798), threw the Bertram family into chaos in Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park (1814).

Known for racy novels about sophisticated Parisian life, such as Georgette (1820), Gustave, ou le Mauvais Sujet (1821), Mon voisin Raymond (1822), and L'Amant de lune (1847).

Born Mary Morris, Knowles married physician Thomas Knowles. A poet, friend of Samuel Johnson, and a gifted conversationalist, Knowles published her "Dialogue between Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Knowles" in the Gentleman's Magazine in June 1971.