The woman admired by the poet Dante Alighieri, mentioned in a number of his poems and the inspiration or model for his fictional guide in Paradiso (c. 1321).

Pope was so significant to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers who followed him that an exhaustive catalog of his work is far beyond the scope of a brief note. Among the most important are An Essay On Criticism (1711); Windsor-Forest (1713); The Rape of the Lock (1714); Eloisa to Abelard (1719); The Dunciad (1728); Of False Taste (1732); An Essay On Man (1733-1734); An Epistle From Mr. Pope, To Dr. Arbuthnot (1735); Of The Characters of Women: An Epistle To A Lady (1735); a series of Horatian satires; and a sequence of pastoral poems.

One of the "Ladies of Llangollen". With Lady Eleanor Butler, the subject of William Wordsworth's sonnet "To the Lady E.B. and the Hon. Miss P.". She and Butler left conventional marriages to move to Llangollen in Wales and cohabitate, fascinating and scandalizing contemporaries by wearing men's clothing. Though many observers believed that the two were a sexual couple, diary evidence suggest that may not have been the case. [MW}

Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, known presently as "Pompey the Great," was considered among the greatest Late Roman generals and statesman. A senatorial noble, triumvir, and opponent of Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great was an influential figure in the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire.

An English poet and clergyman, author of The Choice (1700).

Character in William Shakespeare's drama Hamlet, he is father to Laertes.

An Italian scholar, translator, and author who settled in London in 1790, Polidori was father to John William Polidori, author of The Vampyre, and grandfather to Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti.

English-Italian writer, physician, son of Gaetano Polidori and uncle to Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. Some consider John Polidori as the creator of modern vampire fiction with his work "The Vampyre." John Polidori was Lord Byron's personal physician and participated in the famous ghost story competition in Geneva which resulted in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Inadequately financially supported by his writing or medical career and suffering from debt and depression, Polidori committed suicide in 1821.

Greek historian, essayist, biographer, philosopher, and priest, living from roughly 46-119 C.E. Plutarch's works heavily influenced the development of the biography, the essay, and historical writing in Europe from the 16th to 19th centuries. He is best known for his Parallel Lives, a set of biographies of eminent Greeks and Romans, as well as his Moralia, a collection of essays on ethical, political, religious, physical, and literary subjects.

Novelist, translator, and travel writer, Plumptre was part of the late eighteenth-century Norwich dissenting community. She authored several novels, with Something New, or, Adventures at Campbell-house (1801) now the best remembered. A Narrative of a Three Years' Residence in France (1810) is the publication that did the most for her fame.