Nathaniel P. Ashcroft – författare

A Zeppelin drops a passenger on the English coast, and he walks into the house of a woman who must now decide what she owes her country and what she owes an old debt. Oppenheim wrote it in 1918, when the raids were real and the coast really was watched; the spy story here is domestic, played out over dinner.

A young architect is sent to a remote Cornish parish to survey a church tower and falls in love with the rector's daughter; so, later, does the London critic who reviews his work. Hardy had been that architect, restoring churches for a living, and he set the novel on the cliffs he knew - where he also invented the cliffhanger, quite literally, in the most famous chapter.

A surgeon performs a small operation on a young woman's brain so that she may see the god Pan, and years later a series of London gentlemen begin killing themselves. Machen grew up among the Roman ruins of Gwent and never wrote about anything else, really; this novella was denounced as degenerate in 1894 and has been quietly feeding horror ever since - Stephen King calls it one of the best in the language.

A man who has spent his life in one office arrives at a railway junction with no plans, and stays - and the station tells him its stories, including the signalman on the line below the tunnel mouth who has seen something on the track. Dickens wrote the frame and the best pieces for the Christmas number of 1866, the year after he survived the Staplehurst rail crash. The Signal-Man came out of that.

An army surgeon home from Afghanistan needs cheap lodgings and is introduced to a man conducting experiments in a hospital laboratory. Doyle wrote the first Holmes story in three weeks and sold it outright for twenty-five pounds - the worst bargain in publishing history. The method, the rooms in Baker Street and the friendship all arrive fully formed here.

Two houses on the Yorkshire moors, three generations, and a love that neither party would call by that name - Emily Bronte's only novel was published under a man's name and dismissed as brutal. It is narrated at two removes, by a stranger and a servant, so that the reader must decide how much of what is reported can be believed. Nothing in English fiction is quite like it.

Crusoe, old and rich and unable to sit still, goes back to his island - then on to Madagascar, India, China and overland across Siberia to Archangel. Defoe published the first book at fifty-nine and this sequel four months later; it sold, it was read for a century as the other half of the story, and it is where the castaway turns into something much less comfortable: a trader, a passenger, an old man who cannot stop moving.

Catherine Hayes, a servant girl, marries badly, poisons her way through it and is burnt at Tyburn - and Thackeray, sickened by novels that made criminals romantic, wrote her deliberately repellent to spoil the taste. Born in Calcutta and sent home at five, he lost his orphan's fortune at cards and by then was writing for money; this 1839 serial is his attack on the Newgate novel, and his contempt keeps slipping into something like pity.

John Marcher has told one person his secret: that he is reserved for some rare and terrible fate, and can do nothing but wait for it. May Bartram agrees to wait with him, and the years pass in drawing rooms. James wrote the most frightening story in his work without a single event in it - the beast is in the jungle the whole time, and the reader sees it long before Marcher does.

Emma Woodhouse is handsome, clever, rich, and quite certain she knows what everyone else should want. Austen said she was taking on a heroine whom no one but herself would much like, and then wrote the funniest of her novels around her - a comedy in which every piece of matchmaking misfires because the matchmaker cannot read her own heart. The plot is a puzzle: every clue is on the page, and almost no reader spots them.

A Kansas farm, a marriage made for the land, and a woman who understands too late what she has agreed to - dust, wheat, mortgages, and a husband who is not cruel, only certain. Emanuel Haldeman-Julius sold literature by the ton: his Little Blue Books, five cents each, put Shakespeare and Darwin into the overall pockets of America. He and his wife Marcet wrote this in 1921, and it is much harder than anything the Blue Books were selling.