Janet Hobhouse (1948-1991) was raised in New York City and educated at Oxford. She lived in London and New York and was the author of two works of non-fiction, The Bride Stripped Bare, a study of the female nude in art, and Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein, and four novels, Nellie Without Hugo, Dancing in the Dark, November, and The Furies, which was published after her death from ovarian cancer at the age of forty-two.

Daphne Merkin is the author of Enchantment, a novel and Dreaming of Hitler, a collection of essays. Her cultural criticism has appeared in a range of publications, including Vogue and The American Scholar, and has been widely anthologized. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker, and is currently a contributing writer at Elle and The New York Times Magazine. She lives in New York City, where she teaches writing, and is at work on a memoir, Melancholy Baby.