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.

The Rear-Admiral of Great Britain, Sir Charles Knowles famously and successfully sued Tobias Smollett for libel in 1761.

Archdeacon of Berkshire from 1735 to 1746.

Also known as Meta, the Danish wife of the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock was an esteemed literary intellectual whose letters charmed her contemporaries.

Germany's first major poet of the eighteenth-century, Klopstock was a significant influence on the Sturm und Drang poetic movement to follow. A few of his most important works include The Messiah (1748-1773); a number of religiously inspired stage tragedies, especially The Death of Adam (1757), Solomon (1764), and David (1772); and a large body of shorter poetry. His essay, "On Divine Poetry," written as an introduction to The Messiah, inaugurates a new critical concern with the emotional effects of poetry in its claim that a work of genius must "move the soul."