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,
#2701
Emma Roberts
1794 - 1840 (46 years)
Emma Roberts , often referred to as "Miss Emma Roberts", was an English travel writer and poet known for her memoirs about India. In her own time, she was well regarded, and William Jerdan considered her "a very successful cultivator of the belles lettres".
Go to Profile#2702
Alice Werner
1859 - 1935 (76 years)
Alice Werner CBE was a writer, poet and teacher of the Bantu languages. Life Alice Werner was one of seven children in the family of Reinhardt Joseph Werner of Mainz, teacher of languages, and his wife, Harriett. Her father travelled extensively during the first fifteen years of her life, and she lived in New Zealand, Mexico, United States and throughout Europe, until the family settled in Tonbridge, England, in 1874.
Go to Profile#2703
Rachel Hunter
1754 - 1813 (59 years)
Rachel Hunter was an English woman novelist of the early 19th century who lived and worked in Norwich. She was a contemporary of Jane Austen. Literary setting Rachel Hunter wrote for the same circulating library readership as Jane Austen, and like the latter she might belittle standard novel conventions in writings like Letitia. Her writings were well known in the Austen circle, one acquaintance describing a state of well-being as "quite Palmerstone", after Hunter's Letters from Mrs Palmerstone.
Go to Profile#2704
Anwara Bahar Chowdhury
1919 - 1987 (68 years)
Anwara Bahar Chowdhury was a Bangladeshi social activist and writer. Background and education Chowdhury was admitted to Sakhawat Memorial Girls' High School, established by women rights activist Begum Rokeya. She passed matriculation in 1934. She completed her higher secondary school examination and BA degree from Bethune College of Kolkata. She passed Bachelor in Teaching from Scottish Church College in 1941.
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Elizabeth Williams Champney
1850 - 1922 (72 years)
Elizabeth Williams Champney was an American author of novels and juvenile literature, as well as travel writing, most of which featured foreign locations. Champney's observations and experiences during her European travels were published in Harper's Magazine, and also in The Century Magazine. She published eighty or more articles in Harper's and Century, including a series on Portugal, and papers entitled "A Neglected Corner of Europe", and "In the Footsteps of Futuney and Regnault". After her return to the United States, Champney wrote fifteen books; novels, stories for juveniles, and historical works under cover of stories, mostly adapted to young people.
Go to Profile#2706
Mary Bigelow Ingham
1832 - 1923 (91 years)
Mary Bigelow Ingham was an American author, educator, and religious worker. Dedicated to teaching, missionary work, and temperance reform, she served as professor of French and belles-lettres in the Ohio Wesleyan College; presided over and addressed the first public meeting ever held in Cleveland conducted exclusively by religious women; co-founded the Western Reserve School of Design ; and was a charter member of the order of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
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Beatrice White
1902 - 1986 (84 years)
Beatrice Mary Irene White was a British literary scholar. She had a long association with Westfield College and the English Association. Life White was born in Ely in 1902. In 1919 she started her studies at King's College, London and four years later she graduated with a first class honours degree in English. Three years after that she obtained her master's degree at King's with a thesis about the life and works of the English poet Alexander Barclay. White went on for an extra two years to create an edition of Barclay's "Eclogues" in 1928. She dedicated this book to Professor A. W. Reed who ...
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Helen Rose Hull
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
Helen Rose Hull was born in Albion, Michigan. She is remembered as a novelist, feminist, and English professor. Beginning her teaching career at Wellesley College and Barnard College, she went on to teach creative writing at the Ivy League institution, Columbia University for forty years with her lifelong partner, Mabel Louise Robinson.
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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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Henrietta Gould Rowe
1835 - 1910 (75 years)
Henrietta Gould Rowe was an American litterateur and author of the long nineteenth century. Biography Henrietta Gould was born in East Corinth, Maine, 1835. She was the daughter of Aaron and Sarah Gould. Rowe received an academic education.
Go to Profile#2711
Janis Mayes
Dr. Janis Alene Mayes is an American author, literary critic and translator and a professor in Africana literature. Early life Mayes gained her undergraduate degree in French literature at Fisk University. She was a Fulbright Scholar. She had additional study as a scholar at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. In the 1980s she moved to Syracuse, New York, where she began teaching at Syracuse University in the Department of African American Studies; she is currently a professor there. She teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University.
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Sheila Coronel
Sheila S. Coronel is a Philippines-born investigative journalist and journalism professor. She is one of the founders of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism . In 2006, she was named the inaugural director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. In 2014, she was appointed the School's Academic Dean, a position she held until the end of 2020.
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Margaret Ashmun
1875 - 1940 (65 years)
Margaret Eliza Ashmun was an American writer from Rural, Wisconsin. She trained as a teacher and taught for a few years then concentrated on her writing. She edited collections of short stories and writing textbooks, and wrote dozens of poems, essays, and stories that were published in the popular magazines and newspapers of her day. She was the author of more than 18 novels for both adults and young readers, especially girls.
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Dorothy Burr Thompson
1900 - 2001 (101 years)
Dorothy Burr Thompson was an American classical archaeologist and art historian at Bryn Mawr College and a leading authority on Hellenistic terracotta figurines. Early life Thompson was the elder of two daughters of a prominent Philadelphia family. Her father was attorney Charles Henry Burr Jr. and her mother was novelist and biographer Anna Robeson Brown. Her grandfather was noted orator and lawyer Henry Armitt Brown. Early in life Thompson studied the Classics, attending Miss Hill's School in Center City, Pa., and The Latin School in Philadelphia. She began her study of Latin at age 9 and a...
Go to Profile#2715
Enrica Malcovati
1894 - 1990 (96 years)
Enrica Malcovati was an Italian Classical philologist. Career In 1927, she was the general editor of Athenaeum, following the death of her mentor Carlo Pascal. She became a private teacher at the University of Pavia in 1930, the same year as her magnum opus - the three volumes of Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta - was published.
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G. M. Hirst
1869 - 1962 (93 years)
Gertrude Mary Hirst , better known as G. M. Hirst, was an English-American classicist. Her most influential publication was her 1926 proposal that Livy was born in 64 BC, rather than the traditional date of 59 BC; this claim would later also be advocated by academics including Ronald Syme.
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Bertha Harmer
1885 - 1934 (49 years)
Bertha Harmer was a Canadian nurse, writer and educator, known for writing the textbook Textbook of the Principles and Practice of Nursing. Harmer was born in Port Hope, Ontario, the daughter of a railway carpenter. After finishing high school and working for several years, she earned a nursing degree from the Toronto General Hospital in 1913, and a bachelor's degree in administration and teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City in 1915.
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Amy Clarke
1892 - 1980 (88 years)
Amy Key Clarke was an English mystical poet and writer, and a teacher at The Cheltenham Ladies' College. Early life and education Clarke was born at 121 Elgin Crescent, Kensington, London, England to Henry Clarke, a lecturer and tutor, and his wife Amy , a writer and first headmistress of Truro High School.
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Marion Vera Cuthbert
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Marion Vera Cuthbert was an American writer and intellectual associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Early life Cuthbert was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received her bachelor's degree from Boston University in 1920. She subsequently became principal of Burrel Normal School, then Dean of Women at Talladega College. In 1933, she delivered an address at the NAACP national convention entitled "Honesty in Race Relations." Cuthbert later received her master's degree and Doctorate from Columbia University. Her dissertation, titled "Education and Marginality: A Study of the Negro College Graduate," was a sociological study of the effects of education on the lives of African-American women.
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Hedwig Voegt
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Hedwig Therese Dorothea Henriette Voegt was a German literary scholar who obtained a doctorate in German-Jacobin literature when she was 49 and became a university professor at Leipzig University. While she was a younger woman, modest family circumstances ruled out an academic career. During the 1920s she worked for the post office in Hamburg as a telegrapher and became a political activist , serving at least three prison terms during the twelve Nazi years because of her resistance to the régime.
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Anne Carroll Moore
1871 - 1961 (90 years)
Anne Carroll Moore was an American educator, writer and advocate for children's libraries. She was named Annie after an aunt, and officially changed her name to Anne in her fifties, to avoid confusion with Annie E. Moore, another woman who was also publishing material about juvenile libraries at that time. From 1906 to 1941 she headed children's library services for the New York Public Library system. Moore wrote Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story, one of two runners-up for the 1925 Newbery Medal.
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Phoebe Sheavyn
1865 - 1968 (103 years)
Phoebe Ann Beale Sheavyn was a British literary scholar and feminist. She was a professor at Victoria University of Manchester. She was a founding member of the British Federation of University Women.
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Edith R. Mirrielees
1878 - 1962 (84 years)
Professor Edith Ronald Mirrielees was a pioneering teacher of creative writing; she inspired many talented, distinguished students, including novelist John Steinbeck at Stanford University. Biography Edith Ronald Mirrielees was born on September 10, 1878, in Pittsfield, Illinois, and grew up in Big Timber, Montana.
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Milada Součková
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
Milada Součková was a Czech writer, literary historian, and diplomat. She is known mainly for introducing to Czech literature Modernist techniques employed by English-language writers such as Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.
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Alaíde Foppa
1914 - 1980 (66 years)
Alaíde Foppa was a Guatemalan poet, writer, feminist, art critic, teacher and translator. Born in Barcelona, Spain she held Guatemalan citizenship and lived in exile in Mexico. She worked as a professor in both Guatemala and Mexico. Much of her poetry was published in Mexico and she co-founded one of the first feminist publications, Fem, in the country. After her husband's death, she made a trip to Guatemala to see her mother and renew her passport. She was detained and disappeared in Guatemala City on 19 December 1980, presumed to be murdered. Some sources note the date of her disappearance ...
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Bing Xin
1900 - 1999 (99 years)
Xie Wanying , better known by her pen name Bing Xin or Xie Bingxin, was one of the most prolific Chinese women writers of the 20th century. Many of her works were written for young readers. She was the chairperson of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. Her pen name Bing Xin carries the meaning of a morally pure heart, and is taken from a line in a Tang dynasty poem by Wang Changling.
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Letitia Elizabeth Landon
1802 - 1838 (36 years)
Letitia Elizabeth Landon was an English poet and novelist, better known by her initials L.E.L. The writings of Landon are transitional between Romanticism and the Victorian Age. Her first major breakthrough came with The Improvisatrice and thence she developed the metrical romance towards the Victorian ideal of the Victorian monologue, casting her influence on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti. Her influence can also be found in Alfred Tennyson and in America, where she was very popular. Poe regarded her genius as self-evident.
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Marina Tsvetaeva
1892 - 1941 (49 years)
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron and their daughter Ariadna were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; her husband was executed.
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Lady Gregory
1852 - 1932 (80 years)
Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory was an Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager. With William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn, she co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, and wrote numerous short works for both companies. Lady Gregory produced a number of books of retellings of stories taken from Irish mythology. Born into a class that identified closely with British rule, she turned against it. Her conversion to cultural nationalism, as evidenced by her writings, was emblematic of many of the political struggles to occur in Ireland during her lifetime.
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Mary McCarthy
1912 - 1989 (77 years)
Mary Therese McCarthy was an American novelist, critic and political activist, best known for her novel The Group, her marriage to critic Edmund Wilson, and her storied feud with playwright Lillian Hellman. McCarthy was the winner of the Horizon Prize in 1949 and was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1949 and 1959. She was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome. In 1973, she delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, the Netherlands, under the title Can There Be a Gothic Literature? The same year she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Colette
1873 - 1954 (81 years)
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette , known as Colette, was a French author and woman of letters. She was also a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her 1944 novella Gigi, which was the basis for the 1958 film and the 1973 stage production of the same name. Her short story collection The Tendrils of the Vine is also famous in France.
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E. Nesbit
1858 - 1924 (66 years)
Edith Nesbit was an English writer and poet, who published her books for children as E. Nesbit. She wrote or collaborated on more than 60 such books. She was also a political activist and co-founder of the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation later affiliated to the Labour Party.
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Elizabeth Gaskell
1810 - 1865 (55 years)
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell , often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, was the first biography of Charlotte Brontë. In this biography, she wrote only of the moral, sophisticated things in Brontë's life; the rest she omitted, deciding certain, more salacious aspects were better kept hidden. Among Gaskell's best known novel...
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Selma Lagerlöf
1858 - 1940 (82 years)
Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was a Swedish writer. She published her first novel, Gösta Berling's Saga, at the age of 33. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded in 1909. Additionally, she was the first woman to be granted a membership in the Swedish Academy in 1914.
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Christina Rossetti
1830 - 1894 (64 years)
Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English writer of romantic, devotional and children's poems, including "Goblin Market" and "Remember". She also wrote the words of two Christmas carols well known in Britain: "In the Bleak Midwinter", later set by Gustav Holst, Katherine Kennicott Davis, and Harold Darke, and "Love Came Down at Christmas", also set by Darke and other composers. She was a sister of the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and features in several of his paintings.
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Flannery O'Connor
1925 - 1964 (39 years)
Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations. The unsentimental acceptance or rejection of the limitations or imperfections or differences of these characters typically underpins the drama.
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Janet Spens
1876 - 1963 (87 years)
Janet Spens was a Scottish literary scholar specialising in Elizabethan literature. She was the assistant to Regius Professor Macneile Dixon in the Department of English Language and Literature and "tutor to the women students in Arts" at the University of Glasgow, before joining Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford as a fellow and tutor in English . In 1910, she became the first woman to be awarded a Doctor of Letters degree by the University of Glasgow.
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Jiang Biwei
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Jiang Biwei was influential in the lives of the painter Xu Beihong and the politician Chang Tao-fan. She published her memoirs and she is portrayed in Chinese historical dramas. Life Early life Jiang was born as Jiang Tangzhen in Yixing, Jiangsu province on 9 April 1899. Her father Jiang Meisheng was a scholar and poet who wrote a book on the Zhuangzi, and her mother Dai Qingbo was a poet. She attended the Young Girls Normal School in Changzhou. In 1911, her parents betrothed her to Zha Zihan, who came from an influential family of Haining, Zhejiang.
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Susanna Centlivre
1667 - 1723 (56 years)
Susanna Centlivre , born Susanna Freeman, and also known professionally as Susanna Carroll, was an English poet, actress, and "the most successful female playwright of the eighteenth century". Centlivre's "pieces continued to be acted after the theatre managers had forgotten most of her contemporaries." During a long career at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, she became known as the second woman of the English stage, after Aphra Behn.
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Cora Lenore Williams
1865 - 1937 (72 years)
Cora Lenore Williams was a writer and educator known for pioneering new approaches to small-group instruction for children. She founded the A-Zed School and the Institute for Creative Development, later renamed Williams College, in Berkeley, California.
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Lettie Hamlet Rogers
1917 - 1957 (40 years)
Lettie Hamlett Rogers was an American novelist and educator. She was born in Suzhou, central China, the daughter of missionary parents. She spent her childhood in China and Japan. After graduating from high school at the Shanghai American School she came to the United States to attend Woman's College of the University of North . Rogers received a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology in 1940, and accepted a position as an assistant in the Sociology Department the following year. She shared a home with faculty members Lyda Gordon Shivers and Mereb Mossman. Two years later she left her position,...
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Helen Clarissa Morgan
1845 - 1914 (69 years)
Helen Clarissa Morgan was an American educator from the U.S. state of New York. She was the first woman to be appointed professor of Latin in a US coeducational college. Early years and education Helen Clarissa Morgan was born in Masonville, New York in 1845. The family moved to Oberlin, Ohio when Morgan was 12 years old. She graduated from Oberlin College in 1866, receiving the degree of bachelor of arts, and in 1911 that college conferred upon her the honorary degree of master of arts.
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Mary Robinson
1758 - 1800 (42 years)
Mary Robinson was an English actress, poet, dramatist, novelist, and celebrity figure. She lived in England, in the cities of Bristol and London; she also lived in France and Germany for a time. She enjoyed poetry from the age of seven and started working, first as a teacher and then as actress, from the age of fourteen. She wrote many plays, poems and novels. She was a celebrity, gossiped about in newspapers, famous for her acting and writing. During her lifetime she was known as "the English Sappho". She earned her nickname "Perdita" for her role as Perdita in 1779. She was the first publi...
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Alice Huntington Bushee
1867 - 1956 (89 years)
Alice Huntington Bushee was an American librarian and early pioneer in Hispanic studies. She was a professor at Wellesley College and wrote several books, including Fundamentals of Spanish Grammar. Early years and education Bushee was born on December 4, 1867, in Worcester, Massachusetts. She grew up in Morrisville, Vermont. Bushee graduated from the Peoples Academy in 1886. In 1891, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College. She was the class valedictorian.
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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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Saralabala Sarkar
1875 - 1961 (86 years)
Saralabala Sarkar was an Indian Bengali writer. Early life Saralabala Sarkar was born on 10 December 1875 in Katalpora, Nadia District, Bengal Presidency, British Raj. Her ancestral house was in Bhar Ramdia, Faridpur District, Bengal Presidency. She was home schooled. She was married to Sarat Chandra Sarkar when she was twelve years old. Her husband died when she was twenty-three. Her grandmother was Shreemati Rasasundari, a writer herself, notable for her autobiography that provided a keen insight into the life of a 19th-century Bengali housewife.
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Evelyn Eaton
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Evelyn Sybil Mary Eaton was a Canadian novelist, short-story writer, poet and academic known for her early novels set in New France, and later writings which explored spirituality. Life account Born in Montreux, Switzerland, Eaton was the daughter of Canadians Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Isaac Vernon Eaton, an army officer from Nova Scotia, and Myra Fitzrandolph of New Brunswick. Eaton was the younger of two daughters. Lt.-Col. Eaton was killed in 1917, while directing the artillery assault at the battle of Vimy Ridge in France, when Evelyn Eaton was just 14. Evelyn's older sister, Helen Moira...
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Abby Leach
1855 - 1918 (63 years)
Abby Leach was as an American educator and professor of Greek and Latin at Vassar College. She was appointed as the first female president of the American Philological Association in 1899. Formative years and family Born in Brockton, Massachusetts on May 28, 1855, Abby Leach was one of five children of Marcus and Eliza Paris Bourne Leach. Her father was an owner of a shoemaking business.
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Antonina Riasanovsky
1895 - 1985 (90 years)
Antonina Riasanovsky was a Russian Empire-born writer who, under the pen name Nina Fedorova, wrote The Family, the tenth highest selling fiction book in the United States 1940. The book won the 1940 $10,000 fiction novel prize from the Atlantic Monthly. The Family tells the story of an exiled White Russian family in Tianjin, China.
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