Holcroft, Thomas, 1745-1809

Radical journalist, critic, novelist, translator, and playwright; Holcroft's two most important novels include Anna St. Ives (1792), a novel that reworks plot and character elements of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747-9) to shape a response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), and The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794), which offers a more general satire on the established order. The majority of his plays were comedies, though later work includes the dark, unsuccessful drama, The Inquisitor (1798).

Hogg, James, 1770-1835

Indeed born in the Ettrick Forest and following the occupation of shepherd, James Hogg published several of his works under the sobriquet the "Ettrick Shepherd," a character he was to continue into his Edinburgh writing career, including his contributions to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. His first major publication, The Mountain Bard (1807) was a collection of ballads. His most significant work was a novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1834).