The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential female people in Literature,
#2651
Susa Young Gates
1856 - 1933 (77 years)
Susa Gates was an American writer, periodical editor, president of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, and women's rights advocate. She was a daughter of LDS Church president Brigham Young. Throughout her life, Gates wrote many short stories, novels, poems, and other literary works. According to R. Paul Cracroft's thesis, Gates wrote more than other Mormon writers. Gates was also actively involved in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints where, among other things, she wrote the lesson manuals, was a member of the Relief Society general board, lead genealogical efforts, and served as a ...
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Christine Mohrmann
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Christine A. E. M. Mohrmann was a specialist in early Christian Greek and Latin, vulgar and medieval Latin and honorary professor at Amsterdam University and at the Catholic University of Nijmegen where most of her teaching and research was conducted. Early researches involved her with amongst other writers Augustine, Cyprian and particularly Tertullian. She wrote mainly in Dutch, English French, German and Latin and was particularly known in the English-speaking world for her studies on St Patrick's Latin and for establishing the journal Vigiliae Christianae .
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Gracie Fields
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Dame Gracie Fields was an English actress, singer, comedian and star of cinema and music hall who was one of the top ten film stars in Britain during the 1930s and was considered the highest paid film star in the world in 1937. She was known affectionately as Our Gracie and the Lancashire Lass and for never losing her strong, native Lancashire accent. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and an Officer of the Venerable Order of St John in 1938, and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1979.
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A. M. Dale
1901 - 1967 (66 years)
Amy Marjorie Dale, , published as A. M. Dale, was a British classicist and academic. Life Dale was born in 1901. She studied Classics as an undergraduate at Somerville College, Oxford. She subsequently studied under Ludwig Radermacher at the University of Vienna, and at the University of Lund under Albert Wifstrand. Her first academic post, from 1927 to 1929, was at Westfield College in the University of London, followed by a further post at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
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Gene Gauntier
1885 - 1966 (81 years)
Gene Gauntier was an American screenwriter and actress who was one of the pioneers of the motion picture industry. A writer, director, and actress in films from mid 1906 to 1920, she wrote screenplays for 42 films. She performed in 87 films and is credited as the director of The Grandmother .
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Renata von Scheliha
1901 - 1967 (66 years)
Renata Johanna von Scheliha was a German classical philologist. She authored a number of books, treatises and monographs and carried out several translations. Life Scheliha was born in Zessel, Oels, Silesia , as the daughter of Prussian aristocrat and officer Rudolph von Scheliha. Her mother was a daughter of the Prussian Minister of Finance Johann von Miquel. Her older brother by four years was the diplomat and resistance fighter Rudolf von Scheliha who was executed in December 1942 by the Nazis on a charge of being a member of the Red Orchestra
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Elizabeth Bentley
1767 - 1839 (72 years)
Elizabeth Bentley was an English poet, one of a small wave of British and Irish writers from the labouring classes in the eighteenth century. She was a local poet who was nonetheless engaged with larger political and social issues.
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Margarita de Mayo Izarra
1889 - 1969 (80 years)
Margarita de Mayo Izarra was a Spanish writer, teacher, and journalist. Professional career Margarita de Mayo, after obtaining the title of teacher of Primary Higher Education, taught at a graduate school for girls in Valdepeñas from 1914 to 1918.
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Carolina Marcial Dorado
1889 - 1941 (52 years)
Carolina Marcial Dorado was a Spanish educator, writer, and lecturer based in the United States. She was head of the Spanish department at Barnard College from 1920 until her death in 1941. Early life Carolina Marcial Dorado was born in Camuñas, Toledo, the daughter of José Marcial Palacios, a Protestant clergyman, and María de la Luz Marcial-Dorado; her parents were originally from Andalusia. Her older brother, José Marcial Dorado, was a journalist and briefly a member of the Spanish parliament; he was also secretary of the American Bible Society for the Caribbean, based in Cuba.
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Katharine Lambert Richards Rockwell
1891 - 1972 (81 years)
Katharine Lambert Richards Rockwell was an American theologian, writer, and professor. Rockwell served as national secretary for the YWCA and as a member of their Board of Trustees for two terms. She also chaired the YWCA's Department of Religious Education.
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Branca Edmée Marques
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Branca Edmée Marques de Sousa Torres was a leading Portuguese specialist in the peaceful applications of nuclear technology who obtained a doctorate in Paris under the guidance of Marie Curie. Returning to Lisbon she founded the Radiochemistry Laboratory, where she continued her research for three decades.
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Inna Meiman-Kitrossky
1932 - 1987 (55 years)
Inna Ilyinichna Meiman-Kitrossky was a refusenik, a member of a group of refuseniks-cancer patients, and an author of textbooks for the English language. Life Inna Meiman was born as Ina Fuxson in a Jewish family in Moscow, and graduated from Moscow State Linguistic University, where she worked for many years teaching English. This experience resulted in being awarded a Ph.D. and also in two textbooks: , , which was in usage in several Russian Universities. Meiman also translated from English to Russian and vice versa. She was married for several years and had a son.
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Judy Holliday
1921 - 1965 (44 years)
Judy Holliday was an American actress, comedian and singer. She began her career as part of a nightclub act before working in Broadway plays and musicals. Her success as Billie Dawn in the 1946 stage production of Born Yesterday led to her being cast in the 1950 film version for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. She was known for her performance on Broadway in the musical Bells Are Ringing, winning a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical and reprising her role in the 1960 fi...
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Raïssa Maritain
1883 - 1960 (77 years)
Raïssa Maritain was a French poet and philosopher. She was the wife of Jacques Maritain, with whom she worked and whose companion she was for more than half a century, at the center of a circle of French Catholic intellectuals. Her memoir, Les Grandes Amitiés, which won the prix du Renouveau français, chronicles this. Jacques Maritain, Raïssa and her sister Vera formed what would be called "the three Maritains".
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Emily Huntington Miller
1833 - 1913 (80 years)
Emily Clark Huntington Miller was an American author, editor, poet, and educator who co-founded St. Nicholas Magazine, a publication for children. Earlier in her career, she served as the Assistant Editor of The Little Corporal, a children's magazine and Associate Editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. Miller and Jennie Fowler Willing were involved with organizing a convention in Cleveland in 1874, at which the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union was formed. In September 1891, Miller was appointed Dean of Women at Northwestern University in Illinois.
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Susan Wood
1948 - 1980 (32 years)
Susan Joan Wood was a Canadian literary critic, professor, author and science fiction fan and editor. She was born in Ottawa, Ontario. Biography Wood discovered science fiction fandom while she was studying at Carleton University in the 1960s. Wood met fellow fan Mike Glicksohn of Toronto at Boskone VI in 1969. Wood and Glicksohn married in 1970 , and they published the fanzine Energumen together until 1973. Energumen won the 1973 Hugo for Best Fanzine. Wood and Glicksohn were co-guests of honor at the 1975 World Science Fiction Convention. Wood published a great deal of trenchant criticism of the field, both in fanzines and in more formal venues.
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Julia Harwood Caverno
1862 - 1949 (87 years)
Julia Harwood Caverno was an American classical philologist. Biography Julia Harwood Caverno was born on 19 December 1862 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to the Reverend Charles and Abbie H. S. Caverno. While at school she wrote to the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, whose poem Snow-Bound she and a friend had memorized . She was educated at Smith College for both her BA and MA degrees, graduating in 1887 and 1890 respectively. Her MA thesis examined the similes of Homer in relation to those found in Virgil, Dante, Milton and Tennyson's works.
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Frances Burney
1776 - 1828 (52 years)
Frances Burney was an English playwright and governess, named for her famous aunt. Life and work Frances Burney was a niece of the novelists Frances Burney and Sarah Burney, and granddaughter of the musicologist Charles Burney. One of eight children of musicians Esther "Hetty" Burney and Charles Rousseau Burney , Burney became a governess at the age of 18, and worked in various such posts for the rest of her life. She spent periods in the households of Sir Thomas Plumer and Sir Henry Russell.
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Barbara Ramsden
1903 - 1971 (68 years)
Barbara Mary Ramsden was an Australian book editor who worked for Melbourne University Press from 1941 to 1967. Ramsden was born in the Sydney suburb of Annandale to English migrants Edward and Edith Ramsden. She boarded at Ascham School, and intended to study medicine but instead enrolled in arts at the University of Sydney in 1924. The next year, she moved with her mother and brother to Melbourne, where she enrolled in the University of Melbourne and completed her Bachelor of Arts degree.
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Margaret Heavey
1908 - 1980 (72 years)
Margaret Mary Heavey was a polyglot and classics scholar. She taught in the Classics department at University College Galway from 1931 to 1980, and worked primarily in Irish, translating from Greek and Latin along with writing original works.
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Michelle Reale
1900 - Present (126 years)
Michelle Reale is an Italian-American poet, academic and ethnographer. Reale is an associate professor at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania. She uses poetic inquiry to present her research among African refugees in Sicily and her poetry is mainly concerned with Italian-American life, ethnic identity, histories, family dynamics and remembrance and forgetting. Among master's degrees in English and library and information science, she has an MFA in creative writing with a concentration in poetry. She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
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V. Penelope Pelizzon
1900 - Present (126 years)
V. Penelope Pelizzon is an American poet and essayist. Her first poetry collection, Nostos , won the Hollis Summers Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second poetry collection, Whose Flesh Is Flame, Whose Bone Is Time , was a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She is also co-author of Tabloid, Inc. , a critical study of film, photography, and crime narratives. She is a professor at the University of Connecticut.
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Nancy Barr Mavity
1890 - 1959 (69 years)
Nann "Nancy" Barr Mavity was an American crime mystery author. Early life Nann "Nancy" Clark Barr was born on October 22, 1890, in Lawrenceville, Illinois, the daughter of Dr. Granville Walter Barr and Annabelle Applegate.
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Bettina Linn
1905 - 1962 (57 years)
Mary Bettina Linn was an American writer and college professor. She wrote three published novels, and was on the faculty at Bryn Mawr College. She worked with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.
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C. Violet Butler
1884 - 1982 (98 years)
Christina Violet Butler was a social researcher and educator active in Oxford. She was known for her 1912 study Social Conditions in Oxford which recorded the lives of working class citizens in the Edwardian city. She also taught economics, women's studies, and trained social workers in Oxford.
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Clarice Short
1910 - 1977 (67 years)
Clarice Short was an American poet and academic. Early life and education Clarice Short was born in Ellinwood, Kansas, and grew up in the Arkansas Ozarks, and later near Taos, New Mexico. She attended the University of Kansas, where she earned her B. A. and M. A., She received her PhD from Cornell University in 1941.
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Hazel Hutchins Wilson
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Hazel Hutchins Wilson was an American writer of children's books who turned to writing after a career as a school and university librarian. Biography Born in Portland, Maine, she attended Bates College in Lewiston, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1919. In 1920 she received a Bachelor of Science degree in library science from Simmons College in Boston.
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Jessie Raven Crosland
1879 - 1973 (94 years)
Jessie Crosland was a scholar of medieval French literature, Lecturer in French at Westfield College. Life Jessie Raven was the youngest daughter of the Plymouth Brethren preacher Frederick Edward Raven . She married Joseph Beardsall Crosland, a civil servant whom she met through the Brethren, in 1904. In 1921, she accompanied her husband to the Cairo Conference on the Middle East, later relating her recollections of Winston Churchill's behaviour at the conference: She retired in 194647. Her son was the politician Anthony Crosland . She died on 16 June 1973, in Merton, London.
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Eliza Hall Kendrick
1863 - 1940 (77 years)
Eliza Hall Kendrick was an American college professor. She taught Biblical history at Wellesley College from 1899 to 1931. She was active in ecumenical efforts both internationally and in New England.
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Edith Philips
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Edith Philips was an American writer and academic of French literature. Her research focused on eighteenth-century French literature and French emigration to the United States. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and a professor of French at Goucher College and Swarthmore College. In 1932, she published The Good Quaker in French Legend. She served as the acting dean of women at Swarthmore and was later appointed the Susan W. Lippincott Professor of French in 1941. Philips was the founding chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Swarthmore, serving in this position from 1949 to 1960.
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Helena Theresa Goessmann
1868 - 1926 (58 years)
Helena Theresa Goessmann was an American lecturer, academic, and writer. During the course of 12 years, she gave over 1,000 lectures and talks on historical, educational, literary, and ethical subjects, in the US, including a period of four months in the winter of 1906, when she delivered in the leading Catholic girls' academies, between New York City, Saint Paul, Minnesota, Omaha, Nebraska, and New Orleans, Louisiana, a course, aggregating 125 lectures, on the "Ethics of Scholarship and Education Today". Goessmann served as the head of the department of History, Notre Dame College, Baltimore and professor of English at State College of Massachusetts .
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Elizabeth Hazelton Haight
1872 - 1964 (92 years)
Elizabeth Hazelton "Hazel" Haight was an American classical scholar and academic who specialised in Latin teaching. She spent most of her career working for Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Haight was the second female president of the American Philological Association, and first woman to chair the Advisory Council of the American School of Classical Studies at Rome. She published eleven books in the field of Classics, as well as histories of Vassar and James Monroe Taylor. Her works focused on Latin Literature and the Greek novel, before she began the study of symbolism in Latin literature in her final publications.
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Lauren Klein
Lauren Klein is an American academic who works as an associate professor, and director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Emory University. Klein is best known for her work in digital humanities and for co-authoring the book Data Feminism with Catherine D'Ignazio.
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Grace Macurdy
1866 - 1946 (80 years)
Grace Harriet Macurdy was an American classicist, and the first American woman to gain a PhD from Columbia University. She taught at Vassar College for 44 years, despite a lengthy conflict with Abby Leach, her first employer.
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Eleanor Duckett
1880 - 1976 (96 years)
Eleanor Shipley Duckett was an English-born philologist and medieval historian who spent most of her career in the United States. For thirty years, she taught at Smith College . Duckett published a number of books with University of Michigan Press, mainly on European history, religious history, and saints, and was a reviewer for The New York Times Book Review. Initially, Duckett was known for writing accessible historical books on the Middle Ages; later, she acquired a reputation as an authority on early medieval saints. A devout Episcopalian, Duckett was the lifelong companion of novelist Ma...
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Margaret Schlauch
1898 - 1986 (88 years)
Margaret Schlauch was a scholar of medieval studies at New York University and later, after she left the United States for political reasons in 1951, at the University of Warsaw, where she headed the departments of English and General Linguistics. Her work covered many topics but included focuses on Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon, and Old Norse literature.
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Silva Tipple New Lake
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Silva Tipple New Lake was an American classics professor, archaeologist, and scholar of the New Testament. She was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1929 and 1930, for work on Greek, Syriac and Armenian manuscripts.
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Concha Meléndez
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Dr. Concha Meléndez was an educator, poet, and writer. She was the first woman to belong to the Puerto Rican Academy of Languages. Early years Meléndez was born and raised in Caguas, Puerto Rico, where she received her primary and secondary education. After graduating from high school she enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico where she earned her teacher's certificate.
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Pearl S. Buck
1892 - 1973 (81 years)
Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and novelist. She is best known for The Good Earth, the best-selling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China" and for her "masterpieces", two memoir-biographies of her missionary parents.
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Josephine Johnson
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Josephine Winslow Johnson was an American novelist, poet, and essayist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1935 at age 24 for her first novel, Now in November. To this day she's the youngest person to win the Pulitzer for Fiction. Shortly thereafter, she published Winter Orchard, a collection of short stories that had previously appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, The St. Louis Review, and Hound & Horn. Of these stories, "Dark" won an O. Henry Award in 1934, and "John the Six" won an O. Henry Award third prize the following year. Johnson continued writing short stories and won three more O.
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Mary Augusta Scott
1851 - 1918 (67 years)
Mary Augusta Scott was a scholar and professor of English at Smith College. She was one of the first women to receive a PhD from Yale University, in 1894. Biography Scott was born in Dayton, Ohio, and received her master's degree at Vassar College. She studied at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, Johns Hopkins University, and Yale University; she earned her Ph.D. from Yale in 1894.
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Jacqueline Susann
1918 - 1974 (56 years)
Jacqueline Susann was an American novelist and actress. Her iconic novel, Valley of the Dolls , is one of the best-selling books in publishing history. With her two subsequent works, The Love Machine and Once Is Not Enough , Susann became the first author to have three novels top The New York Times Best Seller list consecutively.
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Medea Norsa
1877 - 1952 (75 years)
Medea Vittoria Irma Norsa was an Italian papyrologist and philologist. She headed the Istituto Papirologico Girolamo Vitelli in Florence from 1935 to 1949. Early life and education Norsa was born to Michele Norsa and Silvia Vittoria Krosna in Trieste on 26 August 1877, the oldest of four children. She was christened Medea Vittoria Irma on 16 September 1877. After Silvia's death in 1886, her father married Caterina Giovanna Furlani in 1894 and had three more children.
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Dorothy Fields
1905 - 1974 (69 years)
Dorothy Fields was an American librettist and lyricist. She wrote over 400 songs for Broadway musicalss and films. Her best-known pieces include "The Way You Look Tonight" , "A Fine Romance" , "On the Sunny Side of the Street" , "Don't Blame Me" , "Pick Yourself Up" , "I'm in the Mood for Love" , "You Couldn't Be Cuter" and "Big Spender" . Throughout her career, she collaborated with various influential figures in the American musical theater, including Jerome Kern, Cy Coleman, Irving Berlin, and Jimmy McHugh. Along with Ann Ronell, Dana Suesse, Bernice Petkere, and Kay Swift, she was one o...
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Catherine Winkworth
1827 - 1878 (51 years)
Catherine Winkworth was an English hymnwriter and educator. She translated the German chorale tradition of church hymns for English speakers, for which she is recognized in the calendar of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She also worked for wider educational opportunities for girls, and translated biographies of two founders of religious sisterhoods. When 16, Winkworth appears to have coined a once well-known political pun, peccavi, "I have Sindh", relating to the British occupation of Sindh in colonial India.
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Melpo Axioti
1905 - 1973 (68 years)
Melpo Axioti was a Greek writer who professed to Communism. She wrote in modern Greek. She spent most of her exile from 1947 to 1964, in the German Democratic Republic. Life and work The daughter of musician and composer Georgios Axiotis, she was raised on the Greek island of Mykonos without a mother. From 1918 to 1922 she attended the school of the Ursulines on the island of Tinos. After a short marriage with her theology professor Vassilis Markaris she went to Athens in 1930, where she soon debuted with short stories in the magazine Mykoniatika Chronika. She was one of the pioneers of Greek surrealism.
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Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne
1623 - 1673 (50 years)
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne was a prolific English philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction writer and playwright. In her lifetime she produced more than 12 original literary works, many of which became well known due to her high social status. This high social status allowed Margaret to meet and converse with some of the most important and influential minds of her time.
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Margaret Verrall
1857 - 1916 (59 years)
Margaret de Gaudrion Verrall was a classical scholar and lecturer at Newnham College, Cambridge. Much of her life and research was concerned with the study of parapsychology, mainly in order to examine how psychic abilities might demonstrate the abilities, breadth and power of the human mind. She began to exhibit and develop psychic abilities herself around 1901, and became both a recipient and analyst of many cross-correspondences produced by psychics, most notably the Palm Sunday scripts.
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Katharine Lee Bates
1863 - 1929 (66 years)
Katharine Lee Bates was an American author and poet, chiefly remembered for her anthem "America the Beautiful", but also for her many books and articles on social reform, on which she was a noted speaker.
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Alice Voinescu
1885 - 1961 (76 years)
Alice Voinescu was a Romanian writer, essayist, university professor, theatre critic, and translator. She was the first Romanian woman to become a Doctor of Philosophy, which she did at the Sorbonne in 1913 in Paris. In 1922, she became a professor of theatrical history at what would become the Royal Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Bucharest, where she taught for over two decades. In 1948, she was removed from her department and spent a year and seven months in prisons in Jilava and Ghencea. After her detention, she was kept under house arrest in the village of Costești near Târgu Frumos until 1954.
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