Mary Jane Lynch Campbell was born on January 1, 1837. She lived in Knoxville, TN and attended the East Tennessee Female Institute in Knoxville, an all-female institution of higher education, during the 1850s. She married Andrew Jackson Campbell (1830-1904) in 1857, and they had at least three children, Ada, Anne, and Rosa. Mary died in Knoxville on January 26, 1923.

Rosa Rogers Campbell Lennon was born on March 28, 1868 to Mary Jane Lynch and Andrew Campbell. She married Edward Herbert Lennon (1863-1927) in 1891, and they had three children: Mary L., Isabelle Tracy, and Edward Herbert. She died on March 24, 1963.

Frances Eliza Hodgson was born to Edwin and Eliza (Boond) Hodgson in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, England on November 24, 1845. Her father died in 1854, and her mother struggled to maintain her late husband's business until 1865, when her brother persuaded her to emigrate to Knoxville, Tennessee where he had established a prosperous dry goods store. Their first few years in America proved difficult, and Frances Hodgson began selling her short stories to earn money in 1868. Her output slowed in 1873 when she married ophthalmologist Swan Moses Burnett. The couple had two sons, Lionel (1874-1890) and Vivian (1876-1937), and moved to Washington, D.C. in 1877. Frances Burnett frequently ignored her family obligations in order travel and associate with such literary personalities as Henry James and Israel Zangwill. The marriage ended in 1898, and Burnett remarried Steven Townsend in 1900. They divorced the following year. In order to support her increasingly lavish lifestyle, Frances Burnett wrote innumerable short stories and over twenty novels, including The Lass o' Lowrie's (1877), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), The Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1910). She settled in Long Island, New York in 1909 and divided her later years between New York and Bermuda, dying in Long Island on October 29, 1924.