Born de Launay, she became lady-in-waiting to the Duchesse du Maine. Implicated in a plot against the Duke of Orléans, she spent two years in the Bastille. Her memoirs are entitled Mémoires de Madame de Staal de Launay (1755).

German physician and prominent phrenologist.

Amsterdam-born rationalist philosopher whose arguments against the immortality of the soul and the possibility of a transcendent God resulted in his excommunication.

Student contributor.

One of the most revered of English poets, Spenser is best known for his allegorical epic The Faerie Queene (1590-1596), which features among its subjects the adventures of the Redcrosse Knight as he attempts to save the virgin Una from the machinations of the villainous Archimago and Duessa. Another of his long poems, The Shepheardes Calender (1579) combines the form of pastoral eclogue with political satire. Spenser's important shorter poems include a series of love sonnets that follow a unique rhyme pattern of Spenser's origination.

Born Adélaïde-Marie-Emilie Filleul in Paris, Souza-Botelho married the comte de Flahaut de La Billarderie and became a noted late eighteenth-century Parisian salonnière. In 1792, events of the revolution forced her to emigrate, first to England, then other locations in continental Europe, before returning to Paris in 1798. She met and married the Portuguese nobleman Dom José Maria de Souza Botelho in 1802. She authored several novels, including Adéle de Senange, ou lettres de Lord Sydenham (1794); Charles et Marie (1802); and Eugène de Rothelin (1808), among others.

An important translator, biographer, travel writer, and critic as well as poet laureate from 1813, Southey enjoyed his most enthusiastic audience for his romantic verse tales such as Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), Madoc (1805), Metrical Tales, and Other Poems (1805), and The Curse of Kehama (1810). His early drama, The Fall of Robespierre (1794), was authored in collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Some of his other more important works include the epic Joan of Arc (1796), Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814), Wat Tyler (1817), and A Vision of Judgement (1821).

Poet Caroline Bowles contributed to gift annuals and periodicals and published several books of verse, prose tales, and essays. She began her career with Ellen Fitzarthur: A Metrical Tale (1820), which she sent to poet laureate Robert Southey, whom she did not at the time know. Southey was impressed with the work and assisted her with revisions and locating a publisher, beginning what proved to be a long and close friendship.

Irish dramatist Thomas Southerne adapted his best-known play Oroonoko (1695) from the 1688 novel, Oroonoko; Or, The Royal Slave, by Aphra Behn (1640-1689). Many of his other plays are adaptations as well, including both Sir Anthony Love, or, The Rambling Lady (1690), adapted from the Aphra Behn novel The Lucky Mistake (1689), and The Fatal Marriage, sometimes referred to as Isabella after the title character, taken from Behn's work The History of the Nun (1689). The Wives' Excuse, or, Cukolds Make Themselves (1691) depicts the plight of a woman trapped in a bad marriage.

The greatest of the Greek tragedians from the golden age of Athens, Sophocles is believed to have authored over 120 plays, only seven of which have survived in their entirety. Those include Antigone, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus, Women of Trachis, Ajax, Oedipus Rex, and Electra.