Talbot, Catherine, 1721-1770

Noted eighteenth-century bluestocking, author, and scholar Catherine Talbot declined to publish any but a very few of her writings during her lifetime. They were edited by her friend Elizabeth Carter as The Works of the Late Mrs. Catherine Talbot (1780). On her father's early death she was adopted by her father's friend, Thomas Secker, later Archbishop of Canterbury.

Shrewsbury, Anna Maria Brudenell Talbot, Countess of, 1642-1702

Wife of Francis Talbot, 11th Earl of Shrewsbury, and mistress of George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, Henry Jermyn, 1st Baron Dover, Colonel Thomas Howard. After Francis Talbot died in duel with George Villiers, Anna moved into the home of Villiers and his wife and gave birth to Villiers' illegitimate son. After the affair was broken off in 1673, Anna's child went to her parents, and she lived in a convent in France. She returned to England in 1677 and remarried with George Rodney Brydges, MP for Haslemere and Winchester.

Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745

A prolific poet, satirist, and political pamphleteer, Swift began his career in satirical fiction with A Tale of a Tub (1704). His most famous work is Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships (1726). A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents, or the Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick (1729) is his best remembered non-fiction satire.

Sunderland, Dorothy Sidney, Countess of, 1617-1684

Woman of letters known for her beauty, wit, and charm. Poet Edmund Waller addressed poems to her under the name "Sacharissa" (from the Latin word "sacharum," meaning "sugar"). In 1635, Dorothy rejected Waller's marriage proposal, and she soon married Henry Spencer at Penhurst. Spencer was killed during the English Civil War, and Dorothy remarried with Sir Robert Smythe nearly a decade later.