Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Professor Emerita of English, Boston College, Philip Davis, Emeritus Professor of Literature and Psychology, University of Liverpool

Rosemarie Bodenheimer has been trying to get her head around Dickens since her undergraduate days. She spent her working life as Professor of English at Boston College, specializing in Victorian and modern fiction. In The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (1994) and Knowing Dickens (2007), she fashioned a form of biographical criticism that juxtaposes a writer's letters with published works, as mutually illuminating forms of writing. After retirement, she published in various areas, most recently Samuel Beckett in the OUP series My Reading (2022).

Philip Davis was, until his retirement, Director of the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS) at the University of Liverpool, with strong interests in reading and inner being, with particular relation to emotion, memory, auto/biography, and fictional realism. His work on Victorian writing includes Memory and Writing, The Victorians volume in the Oxford English Literary History series, Why Victorian Literature Still Matters, and The Transferred Life of George Eliot. He is an editor of two OUP series: The Literary Agenda and My Reading.