Born in London on July 24, 1725, John Newton joined the merchant marine as a youth and had many adventures, including harsh service to a slave-trader. Rescued from this, and while returning home, Newton underwent a sudden religious conversion in March 1748 as he steered the ship through a storm.
John Henry Newman converted from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism in 1845 and was ordained in Rome the next year. His Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), The Grammar of Assent (1870), and The Idea of a University (1873) are important treatises in nineteenth-century English thought.
Born in London but educated in convents on the Continent and in England, Edith Nesbit started out as a writer of stories. In 1880, seven months pregnant, she married Hubert Bland, a founding member of the Fabian Society when it was founded four years later.
"Mother Goose" begins as a 1729 English translation of the name of Charles Perrault's tale-teller in Contes de Ma Mere Loye (1697). The popularity of these tales as translated evidently led John Newbery to name his collection of songs Mother Goose's Melody about 1765.
Marianne Moore was born November 15, 1887, in Kirkwood, Missouri, raised largely by her mother, a schoolteacher at the Metzger Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Marianne Moore entered Bryn Mawr in 1905.
Moore's career was academic: born in New York, he took a B.A. from Columbia University in 1798 and from 1823 to 1850 was Professor of Oriental and Greek Literature at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, whose site he in fact donated for the college.