290 authors,
one library.

Edgar Wallace was an English writer of astonishing productivity, illegitimate and raised by a Billingsgate fish porter, who left school at twelve.

Horace Walpole was an English writer, collector and politician, son of Britain's first prime minister, who turned his villa at Strawberry Hill into a Gothic fantasy of battlements and staine

William W. Walter was an American Christian Science writer who put the doctrine into fiction: his novels dramatise illness cured by right thinking rather than medicine, and were sold chiefly

Mary Webb wrote Shropshire the way she saw it — hill farms, poachers, and country people crushed by their own superstitions — while suffering from Graves' disease and selling her own vegetab

H. G. Wells was an English writer who trained under Darwin's champion T.

Mary C. E. Wemyss wrote about the English at their least heroic — the unmarried aunt who is everyone's convenience, the country weekend, the child who says the wrong thing at tea.

Stanley John Weyman was an English novelist who practised at the bar without success — briefly jailed in France on suspicion of spying while on holiday — and turned to historical romance ins

Edith Wharton was born into the closed New York society she would later dissect, and she dissected it from the inside, knowing exactly which rules were never spoken aloud.

Oscar Wilde was an Irish playwright, novelist and wit, the most celebrated conversationalist of late-Victorian London.

Valentine Williams was a Reuters correspondent who was wounded on the Somme, went into military intelligence, and spent the rest of his life writing thrillers about the trade he had actually

P. G. Wodehouse was an English humorist who created Jeeves and Wooster and Blandings Castle, and wrote some ninety books and the lyrics to thirty musicals.

Emma Wolf was born in San Francisco to French Jewish immigrants, wrote with one arm paralysed from birth, and rarely left the city.

Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer and philosopher whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) argued that women appear inferior only because they are denied education.

Mrs. Henry Wood was an English novelist who wrote lying on a couch, curved from childhood by a spinal condition, and produced some forty books.

Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist at the centre of the Bloomsbury group, who with her husband Leonard ran the Hogarth Press by hand from their dining room and set the type