Beatrice H. Ainsworth – författare

An American with a Central European face is mistaken for a mad king who has escaped his keepers - and finds that impersonating him is easier than explaining, and considerably more dangerous. Burroughs failed at ranching, gold dredging and selling pencil sharpeners before deciding at thirty-five that he could write better than what he was reading; this 1914 romance is his Ruritanian one, written at speed and moving like it.

Robin Hood as high comedy: Marian, an heiress who can shoot better than most of the outlaws, walks out of her own wedding into Sherwood, and the friar, the baron and the sheriff argue about it in perfect Regency prose. Peacock spent his days as an official of the East India Company and his evenings mocking everyone he knew; this 1822 novel is his lightest, and the songs in it are genuinely good.