Henry James was born in New York in 1843 and was educated in Europe and America. He left Harvard Law School in 1863, after a year's attendance, to concentrate on writing, and from 1869 he began to make prolonged visits to Europe, eventually settling in England in 1876.

His literary output was prodigious and of the highest quality: more than ten outstanding novels, including The Portrait of a Lady and The American; countless novellas and short stories; as well as innumerable essays, letters, and other pieces of critical prose. Known by contemporary fellow novelists as 'the Master', James died in Kensington, London, in 1916.

Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Oxford (1717 97), was a writer, antiquarian and Whig politician best known for his letter-writing and for The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel.

Gaston Leroux was born on 6 May 1868 in Paris and after school in Normandy, he returned to Paris to study law. His extreme gambling is well-documented after he squandered the millions he had inherited, narrowly escaping bankruptcy. He worked as a court reporter and theatre critic before landing a job as an international correspondent for Le Matin.

During this time Leroux travelled to Russia to experience and report on the Russian Revolution. In 1907 he gave up journalism to become a writer, and quickly found success with Le Mystore de la Chambre Jaune (1908). He became well-known for his popular and acclaimed crime and thriller novels, but Leroux also wrote poetry and short fiction.

His most famous work, Le FantPme de l'OpUra (The Phantom of the Opera), was inspired by a tour of the cellars at the Paris Opera, and published in 1911. The story has been adapted for film and, most notably, for Andrew Lloyd Webber's long-running musical. Gaston Leroux died on 15 April 1927.

Emily Bronte was born at Thornton, in Yorkshire, in 1818 and died in 1848. She was the younger sister of Charlotte Bronte and the fifth of six children.

Like her sister, Emily worked as a governess and later attended a private school in Brussels. Emily published poetry under a male pseudonym to avoid prejudice against female writers but Wuthering Heights was her only novel.

John Meade Falkner (1858-1932) was an English novelist and poet, best known for his 1898 novel, Moonfleet. An extremely successful businessman as well, he became chairman of the arms manufacturer Armstrong Whitworth during World War I.

William Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824, the son of a successful and popular painter. On leaving school, he worked in the office of a tea merchant in the Strand before reading law as a student at Lincoln's Inn. However his real passion was for writing and, in 1850, he published his first novel, Antonina.

In 1851, the same year that he was called to the bar, he met and established a lifelong friendship with Charles Dickens. While Collins' fame rests on his best known works, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, he wrote over thirty books, as well as numerous short stories, articles and plays. He was a hugely popular writer in his lifetime. An unconventional individual, he never married but established long-term liaisons with two separate partners. He died in 1889.

Richard Marsh (1857-1915) was the pseudonym of the British author born Richard Bernard Heldman. He is best known for his supernatural thriller The Beetle- A Mystery, published in the same year as Bram Stoker's Dracula and initially even more popular.

Heldman was educated at Eton and Oxford University. Several of the prolific Marsh's novels were published posthumously.