Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on August 30, 1797, into a life of personal tragedy. In 1816, she married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and that summer traveled with him and a host of other Romantic intellectuals to Geneva.

Her greatest achievement was piecing together one of the most terrifying and renowned stories of all time: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Shelley conceived Frankenstein in, according to her, "a waking dream."

This vision was simply of a student kneeling before a corpse brought to life. Yet this tale of a mad creator and his abomination has inspired a multitude of storytellers and artists. She died on February 1, 1851.,

Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh on 15 August 1777. He was educated in Edinburgh and called to the bar in 1792, succeeding his father as Writer to the Signet, then Clerk of Session. He published anonymous translations of German Romantic poetry from 1797, in which year he also married. In 1805 he published his first major work, a romantic poem called The Lay of the Last Minstrel, became a partner in a printing business, and several other long poems followed, including Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810) . These poems found acclaim and great popularity, but from 1814 and the publication of Waverley , Scott turned almost exclusively to novel-writing, albeit anonymously.

A hugely prolific period of writing produced over twenty-five novels, including Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), Kenilworth (1821) and Redgauntlet (1824) . Already sheriff-depute of Selkirkshire, Scott was created a baronet in 1820. The printing business in which Scott was a partner ran into financial difficulties in 1826, and Scott devoted his energies to work in order to repay the firm’s creditors, publishing many more novels, dramatic works, histories and a life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Sir Walter Scott died on 21 September 1832 at Abbotsford, the home he had built on the Scottish Borders.

Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh in 1771, educated at the High School and University there and admitted to the Scottish Bar in 1792. From 1799 until his death he was Sheriff of Selkirkshire, and from 1806 to 1830 he held a well-paid office as a principal clerk to the Court of Session in Edinburgh, the supreme Scottish civil court. From 1805, too, Scott was secretly an investor in, and increasingly controller of, the printing and publishing businesses of his associates, the Ballantyne brothers.

Howard Pyle (1853 - 1911) was an American illustrator and author, primarily of books for young people.

A native of Wilmington, Delaware, he spent the last year of his life in Florence, Italy.

George Gissing (1857-1903) was an English novelist, who published twenty-three novels between 1880 and 1903. Meagrely successful in his lifetime, by the 1940s he had been recognized as a literary genius, with George Orwell pronouncing that 'England has produced few better novelists'.

William Morris (1834-1896) was one of the most influential thinkers and artists of his time. At Oxford, with the painter Burne-Jones, he fell under the influence of Ruskin and Rossetti.

Preoccupied with the poverty of modern design he taught himself at least thirteen crafts and founded his own design firm, Morris & Co.

In the late 1870s he became active in political and environmentalist matters and converted to socialism in 1883, helping to found the Socialist League a year later.

James Hogg (1770-1835) was born near Selkirk in the Scottish Borders. From a young age he was determined to be a poet like Burns. He became friends with Walter Scott and in 1810 he went to Edinburgh to seek a literary career.

His most well-known work, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, made little impact when it first appeared (anonymously) in 1824, but has since won critical interest and attention as a classic of the Scottish canon. He continued to publish poetry and prose until his death in 1835.

Tobias Smollett (1721 - 71) was a Scottish poet and novelist famed for his picaresque novels The Adventures of Roderick Random, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker.

John Bunyan (1628–88) was an English preacher and writer who wrote over sixty books and tracts. Bunyan was a Reformed Baptist, and his religious beliefs led to his persecution during the Restoration. While imprisoned Bunyan wrote the spiritual allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, which quickly became one of the foundational texts of Protestant thought.