Volume 1 covers the English Renaissance, with entries on Shakespeare and other major Elizabethan writers such as Christopher Marlowe, Sir Philip Sidney, and more. Also profiled are writers of the early 17th century, including John Milton and metaphysical poets such as John Donne, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, and others. Volume 2 covers the Restoration period and the Age of Reason, with entries on such writers as Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Robert Burns, and many others. Volume 3 covers the writers of the 19th century, profiling such influential figures as Jane Austen, Robert Browning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Keats, Bram Stoker, Alfred Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, Oscar Wilde, and William Wordsworth. Volume 4 profiles British writers of the 20th century, with entries on such significant authors as W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Roald Dahl, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Joyce, C. S. Lewis, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Salman Rushdie, Tom Stoppard, Dylan Thomas, Evelyn Waugh, and Virginia Woolf.