François Edouard Joachim Coppée (26 January 1842 - 23 May 1908) was a French poet and novelist. He was born in Paris to a civil servant. After attending the Lycée Saint-Louis he became a clerk in the ministry of war, and won public favour as a poet of the Parnassian school. His first printed verses date from 1864. In 1869 his first play, Le Passant, starring Sarah Bernhardt and Madame Agar, was received with approval at the Odéon theatre, and later Fais ce que dois (1871) and Les Bijoux de la délivrance (1872), short poetic dramas inspired by the Franco-Prussian War, were applauded.

Alice Muriel Williamson was an American-British novelist. She was born in America, the daughter of Mark Livingston of Poughkeepsie. She came to England when young. In 1894, soon after arrival in England, she married the magazine editor Charles Norris Williamson (1859-1920), "the first editor to whom she presented an introduction." Many of her books were jointly written with her husband. After her marriage she introduced herself as Mrs. C. N. Williamson. A number of their novels cover the early days of motoring and can also be read as travelogues. Alice apparently said of her husband "Charlie Williamson could do anything in the world except write stories" she said of herself "I can't do anything else." She continued to write after her husband's death in 1920.

"Mrs Maud Churton Braby has achieved a remarkable success. She has written an original book upon the most threadbare of all subjects, in which she has been as witty as she is wise . . . packed full of good sense, sound morality, and admirable advice. It is a book naked and unashamed, written by a woman of the world with the naïve simplicity of an innocent child, and arriving on the whole at conclusions worthy of any mother in Israel; a book full of profound wisdom irradiated by a pleasant wit and suffused with the glow of a genuine human sympathy."

"It was high noon in the desert, but there was no dazzling sunlight. Over the earth hung a twilight, a yellow-pink softness that flushed across the sky like the approach of a shadow, covering everything yet concealing nothing, creeping steadily onward, yet seemingly still, until, pressing low over the earth, it took on changing color, from pink to gray, from gray to black-gloom that precedes tropical showers. Then the wind came-a breeze rising as it were from the hot earth-forcing the Spanish dagger to dipping acknowledgment, sending dust-devils swirling across the slow curves of the desert-and then the storm burst in all its might. For this was a storm-a sand-storm of the Southwest."