Marjorie Grant Cook was born in Canada but lived in England from 1915. She made extended visits back to Canada for the rest of her life, but made her living as a reviewer and literary critic in the UK, publishing seven novels and well oiver a thousand reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, among other papers. She was a clsoe friend of the novelist Rose Macaulay. She died in Pulborough, Sussex.

Sarah LeFanu is a British biographer and arts critic, and a descendant of the Victorian Irish Gothic novelist Sheridan Le Fanu. She is the author of Something of Themselves: Kipling, Kingsley, Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Boer War (2020), S Is for Samora: A Lexical Biography of Samora Machel and the Mozambican Dream (2012), Rose Macaulay: A Biography (2003), and In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988), which won the MLA Emily Toth Award.