Robert Harborough Sherard:

Robert Harborough Sherard was born in London on December 3, 1861, the fourth child of the Reverend Bennet Sherard Calcraft Kennedy, the illegitimate son of the sixth and last Earl of Harborough. His mother was Jane Stanley Wordsworth, granddaughter of the poet. In 1880 he went up to New College, Oxford but after a quarrel with his father, who cut him off from the expected family inheritance, was forced to leave for financial reasons. At this time he dropped the surname Kennedy. He left for Europe and later enrolled at the University of Bonn to study law and oriental languages, but again had to leave for lack of money.

At the age of twenty he settled in Paris to earn his living as a journalist and novelist. In Paris he became acquainted with a number of the leading French literary figures of the eighties and nineties, including Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet, and also with Oscar Wilde, with whom he formed a close friendship, although they fell out after Wilde's release from prison. In 1902, two years after Wilde's death, he published 'Oscar Wilde: the story of an unhappy friendship', which was to be the first of several works in which he maintained Wilde's innocence of the charge of homosexuality. Others include 'Oscar Wilde twice defended' (1934) and 'Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde' (1936).

Sherard supported himself mostly through journalism, contributing articles to papers in France, England and America. He was also a prolific writer of novels, biographies and social commentaries, publishing thirty-three works in total. The biographies, besides those on Wilde, are 'Emile Zola' (1893), 'Alphonse Daudet' (1894), and 'Guy de Maupassant' (1926). His social investigations, during which he lived with the poor and studied their conditions, resulted in works such as 'The White Slaves of England' (1897). In 1933 he founded the Vindex Publishing Co., Calvi, in Corsica, and he used this base to publish several pamphlets he wrote attacking Gide's biography of Wilde. He lived in France for most of his life but died in Ealing (UK) on January 30, 1943.

Francis Watson:

Francis Watson was born in Dudley, Worcestershire (UK) and attended St. John's College, Cambridge. He worked for a number of publishing companies before spending nearly four decades working at the Wallace Collection in London, where he published a widely acclaimed furniture catalog. In 1947 he was given the appointment of deputy surveyor of the King's works of art. Watson was a prolific writer, including very many radio programs. He is probably best known for his biography of Dawson of Penn and for his publications on eighteenth-century decorative arts.

Glennyth M. Woods Holtz:

Glennyth M. Woods (born in 1914 in Oregon) was a correspondent of Robert Sherard who first contacted him because of her interest in Oscar Wilde. Sherard thought of her as an adopted niece because she shared the same first name as one of his nieces. A published author, Woods worked at the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington D.C. and also lived in Denver for a time. She went with the 82nd Airborne Division to England with the American Red Cross during World War II and returned in January of 1946 on the Queen Mary. She later married Oscar Holtz.