Susannah Carson (b. 1975) is a doctoral candidate in French at Yale University. Previous degrees include an M. Phil from the Sorbonne-Paris III, as well as MAs from the Université des Lumières-Lyon II and San Francisco State University. Her work has appeared in the journal Seventeeth-Century French Studies as well as in the collection Religion, Ethics, and History in the French Long Seventeenth Century. She is the editor of this collection of essays on Jane Austen. Photo: Eric Carter

Harold Bloom (b. 1930) is a literary critic whose work ranges from the poetics of influence to Gnosticism. His books include The Anxiety of Influence (1973), The Western Canon (1994), Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), How to Read and Why (2000), and Where Shall Wisdom Be Found (2004). Bloom was awarded with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism in 1999. He is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. He took time off from writing his next book, The Living Labyrinth, to write the foreword on Jane Austen.

Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) was an English novelist, poet, and critic. He wrote experimental novels such as The Anti-Death League (1966), but is best known for the wry irreverence of such novels as Lucky Jim (1954), Take a Girl Like You (1960), and the Booker Prize-winning The Old Devils (1986).

Martin Amis (b. 1949) is known for the innovative narrative techniques and themes of novels such as Money (1984), London Fields (1989), Time's Arrow (1992), and Yellow Dog (2003). The War Against Cliche (2001) is a collection of critical essays and articles. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester.

Louis Auchincloss (b. 1917) is a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, historian, and lawyer. He has written over thirty novels, many of which are novels of manners depicting the moral dilemmas of upper-class New England society.

Amy Bloom (b. 1953) has written novels including Love Invents Us (1997) and Away (2007) Her short stories have appeared in anthologies such as The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories, and have been collected in Come to Me (1993) and A Blind Man Can See How Much I love You (2000). Her articles have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and Vogue. Bloom was the creator of the television series State of Mind (2007). She teaches at Yale. Her next book is a collection of short stories, Where the God of Love Hangs Out (2010).

Eva Brann (b. 1929) was born in Berlin and migrated to the United States in 1941. She is the author of Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Illiad (2002), The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates' Conversations and Plato's Writings (2004), and Feeling our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People Should Know (2008). Brann was awarded a National Humnaities Medal in 2005. Since 1957, she has taught at St. John's College, Anapolis, Maryland.

A. S. Byatt (b. 1936) is a British novelist, short-story writer, and poet who combines realism and fantasy in short stories such as those collected in The Matisse Stories (1993) and in novels such as Still Life (1985), which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and Possession (1990), which won the Booker Prize.

Susanna Clarke (b. 1959) is known for a style that combines fairy-tale magic with Dickensian realism. Her first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004), won the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award. She has also written a number of shorter pieces, many of which have been collected in The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (2006). She was raised in Northern England and Scotland, and currently resides in Cambridge and Derbyshire.

James Collins (b. 1958) is a writer and editor whose first novel, Beginner's Greek (2008), is a study in romantic irony and optimism. He has been a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, and he has written and served as editor for Time and Spy magazines. He is a New Yorker who currently resides in rural Virginia.

Alain de Botton (b. 1969) has written novels such as Essays in Love and essayistic books such as How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), The Art of Travel (2002), Status Anxiety (2004), The Architecture of Happiness (2006), and The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009). He was born in Zurich, Switzerland, and currently resides in London where he helps to run The School of Life.

E. M. Forster (1879-1970) wrote short stories and novels characterized by their ironic tone and humanistic intent. Differences of class, culture, and sexuality are themes that run through his major works, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), A Room with a View (1908), Howard's End (1910), A Passage to India (1924), and Maurice (1971). In his Aspects of the Novel (1927), he examines the craft of novel writing. Forster was a member of the London literary society, the Bloomsbury Group.

Donald Greene (1914-1997) was a Canadian academic who specialized in Samuel Johnson. His works include The politics of Samuel Johnson (1960), The Age of Exuberance: Backgrounds to Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1970), and Samuel Johnson (1984). He also wrote on Jane Austen, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene. Grreene taught in several universities in both Canada and the United States before finishing his career at the University of Southern California (1968-1984).

Amy Heckerling (b. 1954) is a director, writer and producer. Her films include Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985), Look Who's Talking (1989), and Clueless (1995). She was born in the Bronx, and currently divides her time between New York and Los Angeles.

Diane Johnson (b. 1934) is the author of the satirical, cross-cultural novels Le Divorce (1997), for which she won the California Book Awards gold medal, as well as Le Mariage (2000), L'Affaire (2004), and Lulu in Marrakech (2009). She is a long-term, frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Johnson was born in Moline, Illinois, and currently divides her time between San Francisco and Paris.

C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) was a Northern Irish novelist, broadcaster, and academic who taught medieval literature at Oxford and Cambridge. In addition to The Screwtape Letters (1942) and The Chronicles of Narnia (1960-56), he wrote works of criticism such as The Allegory of Love (1936) and The Discarded Image (1964).

Margot Livesey (1953) is a Scottish-born novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her novels include The Missing World (2000), Eva Moves the Furniture (2001), Banishing Verona (2005), and The House on Fortune Street (2008), which won the L. L. Winship Award. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. Livesey lives in the Boston area, and is writer-in-residence at Emerson College.

David Lodge (b. 1935) is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, where he taught from 1960 to 1987. The academic world is fictionalized in many of his novels, which include Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984), Nice Work (1988), and, most recently, Deaf Sentence (2008). Lodge's critical works include The Modes of Modern Writing (1977), The Art of Fiction (1992), Consciousness and the Novel (2003), and The Year of Henry James (2006).

W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was a British playwright, novelist, short-story writer, travel writer, an spy. His many novels include Of Human Bondage (1915), The Painted Veil (1925), Christmas Holiday (1939), Up at the Villa (1941), and The Razor's Edge (1944). The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930) is a collection of travel essays, and A Writer's Notebook (1949) is a selection of his journal entries.

Jay McInerney (b. 1955) is the author of seven novels which serve as iconoclastic depictions of upper-middle-class urban life. His trend-setting Bright Lights, Big City (1984) was followed by Story of My Life (1988), Brightness Falls (1992), The Last of the Savages (1997), Model Behavior (1998), and The Good Life (2006). McInerney has also written essays on wine, which have been collected in Bacchus & Me (2000) and A Hedonist in the Cellar (2006). How it Ended (2009) is his latest collection of short stories.

Rebecca Mead (b. 1966) has been a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine since 1997, where she has profiled institutions and individuals ranging from the Metropolitan Opera to Spring Break and from Santiago Calatrava to Shaquille O'Neal. She was born in London, and was educated at Oxford University and NYU. Her first book, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, was published in 2007. She lives in New York.

Benjamin Nugent (b. 1977) is the author of American Nerd: The Story of My People (2009). His fiction has appeared in Tin House and his nonfiction in GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Time, and N+1. He grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts. An Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he lives in Iowa City. He is currently working on a memoir entitled The Shapeshifters.

J. B. Priestley (1894-1984) was a British writer whose many works include the novel The Good Companions (1929), the play An Inspector Calls (1946), the critical survey Literature and Western Man (1960), and the episodes of his BBC broadcast The Postscript (1940-41).

Anna Quindlen (b. 1952) has written bestselling novels including One True Thing (1994), Black and Blue (1998), Blessings (2002), and Rise and Shine (2006). Her nonfiction includes How Reading Changed My Life (1998), A Short Guide to a Happy Life (2000), and her latest book, Good Dog. Stay (2009). Hew New Yotk Times column Public and Private was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary (1992).

Ignes Sodre is a Brazilian psychologist who has lived and practiced in London since 1969. In addition to writings on clinical psychoanalysis, she has published criticism on classical authors such as George Eliot and Shakespeare.

Brian Southam (b. 1931) is esteemed for the exhaustive and essential historical research he has conducted into Jane Austen's life, family, and manuscripts. He served as chairman of the Jane Austen Society of North America from 1990 to 2005. His books include Jane Austen and the Navy (2000, 2005) and Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts: A Study of the Novelist's Development (1964, 2000). He has edited several volumes of past and contemporary critical essays, and has produced editions of Sanditon (1975), Jane Austen's "Sir Charles Grandison" (1980), and the first fully collated edition of Volume the Second (1969). He is working on two further books: Jane Austen and the Professions and Jane Austen Beside the Seaside: A Romantic Tale, from Sidmouth to Sanditon.

Janet Todd (b. 1942) is a Welsh-born academic who specializes in British women's literature from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries. She is the author of The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (1996), The Revolutionary Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (2000), and The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen (2006); she is editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (2005-2009). Todd is President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge.

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) was an American literary critic who studied and taught at Columbia University (from 1921) and who was a member of The New York Intellectuals. His essays chronicle the moral history of literature; they are collection in The Liberal Imagination (1950), The Opposing Self (1955), Beyond Culture (1965), Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), and The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent (2001).

Ian Watt (1917-1999) was a British literary critic who taught at the University of California, Berkeley (1952-62) and Stanford University (1964-99). His Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (1957) was a founding work of sociohistorical literary criticism.

Fay Weldon (b. 1931) is a feminist novelist, essayist, and playwright. Her novels include The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1985), The Bulgari Connection (2001), and The Stepmother's Diary (2009). Her Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (1984) is a series of epistolary essays. She wrote the screenplay for the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (1980). She currently holds the post of Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, West London.

Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was Mississippi-based writer and photographer whose work captures the essence of Southern society throughout the course of the twentieth century. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Optimist's Daughter (1972) and the Rea Award (1992) for short stories ranging from the early "Death of a Traveling Salesman" (1936) to the later "Moon Lake" (1980).

John Wiltshire is a British-born academic living in Australia who specializes in the work of Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, and Fanny Burney. His work on Austen includes the Cambridge edition of Mansfield Park (2005), and the books Jane Austen and the Body: "The Picture of Health" (1992), Recreating Jane Austen (2001), Jane Austen: Introductions and Inventions (2003), and The Cinematic Jane Austen (with David Monaghan and Ariane Hudulet) (2009). He is Emeritus Professor of Englih at La Trobe University, Australia.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her modernist novels include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931), and her nonfiction includes the feminist essayistic book A Room of One's Own (1929). She was a member of the London literary society, the Bloomsbury Group.