1st century CE Roman poet, author of Thebaid, which recounts the struggle between Oedipus's sons for control of Thebes.

The third Duke of Buckingham, Edward Stafford was a first cousin once removed of King Henry VIII. Stafford held immense political power during the reign of Henry VIII, until he was accused, likely falsely, of plotting to kill the king and thus beheaded a month later.

Staël's Delphine (1803) was popular among British women, but her Corinne, ou l'Italie (1807) exerted a crucial influence on Romantic women's conceptions of the female artist. Her career as a critic, literary philosopher, and analyst of national character began with Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau (1788), translated as Letters on the Works and Character of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1789).

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).