Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and died in 1930. Within those years was crowded a variety of activity and creative work that made him an international figure and inspired the French to give him the epithet 'the good giant'.

He was the nephew of 'Dickie Doyle' the artist, and was educated at Stonyhurst, and later studied medicine at Edinburgh University, where the methods of diagnosis of one of the professors provided the idea for the methods of deduction used by Sherlock Holmes. He set up as a doctor at Southsea and it was while waiting for patients that he began to write.

His growing success as an author enabled him to give up his practice and turn his attention to other subjects. His greatest achievement was, of course, his creation of Sherlock Holmes, who soon attained international status and constantly distracted him from his other work; at one time Conan Doyle killed him but was obliged by public protest to restore him to life.

And in his creation of Dr Watson, Holmes's companion in adventure and chronicler, Conan Doyle produced not only a perfect foil for Holmes but also one of the most famous narrators in fiction.

English novelist and playwright John Galsworthy (1867–1933) was among the first writers of the Edwardian era to challenge the social ideals portrayed in Victorian literature. The plight of women trapped in unhappy marriages is among his recurring themes, and in addition to championing women's rights, his work promoted prison reform and animal welfare.

D. H. Lawrence, born in England in 1885, is one of the key figures in literary modernism. Among his most notable novels are Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920) and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). Kangaroo (1923) was published the year after Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, spent three months in Australia. Lawrence died in France in 1930.

William Wymark Jacobs (1863 1943) was a prolific short-story writer.

Known for his trademark wit even in the horror story 'The Monkey's Paw', for which he is best known Jacobs set most of his stories in the docks of East London, where he lived from a young age, as well as in Essex, where he moved in his middle age.

Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset in 1840. His first published novel was Desperate Remedies in 1871. Such was the success of these early works, which included A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) and Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), that he gave up his work as an architect to concentrate on his writing.

However, he had difficulty publishing Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1889) and was forced to make changes in order for it to be judged suitable for family readers. This, coupled with the stormy reaction to the negative tone of Jude the Obscure (1895), prompted Hardy to abandon writing novels altogether and he concentrated on poetry for the rest of his life. He died in January 1928.