Charles Langbridge Morgan was born in 1894 to Sir Charles Langbridge Morgan, civil engineer, and Mary Polly Watkins (d. 1906/7). He served in the Royal Navy during the First World War, during which time he was captured and held as a prisoner of war in Holland, before being paroled to live in a cottage on the Rosendaal estate in Gelderland. During his internment, Morgan wrote several short stories and poems and was introduced to the French language, which marked the beginning of his lifelong love of the language and culture of France. After the war, Morgan published his debut novel, The Gun Room (1919) and took up a place studying history at Brasenose College, Oxford. In 1922 he joined the staff of The Times and met the Welsh novelist, Hilda Vaughan. The two married the following year and went on to have two children, Dame Elizabeth Shirley Vaughan Paget, Marchioness of Anglesey (née Morgan) (1924-2017) and Roger Hugh Vaughan Charles Morgan (1926-2018). Charles and Hilda were united by their mutual interest in writing novels and they often read and critiqued early drafts of each other's work, making their marriage a fruitful creative partnership. In 1926 Charles Morgan became Principle Dramatic Critic of The Times, a position that he retained for 13 years. During his lifetime he published eleven novels, three plays, and a number of essays and poems which received considerable critical praise. His correspondence demonstrates the vast network of relationships that he and his wife Hilda had with many notable contemporary literary figures, including Edith Sitwell, Thomas Hardy, and Virginia Woolf. Charles Morgan died in 1958 at the age of 64.

Hilda Campbell Vaughan (1892-1985) was born in 1892 in Builth Wells, Wales, to Hugh Vaughan Vaughan (1852-1936) and Eva Campbell. She was educated at home for most of her young life and her experiences growing up in rural Wales heavily influenced her literary works, which are mostly set in the historic county of Radnorshire. Hilda worked for the Red Cross during the First World War and later for the Women’s Land Army. After the war ended she moved to London and in 1923 she married Charles Langbridge Morgan. She published ten novels and several short stories in her lifetime, as well as a play, She Too Was Young (1938), that received critical praise upon its stage debut. In 1963 she was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Hilda Vaughan died in 1985 at the age of 93. While Vaughan’s work was somewhat overshadowed during her lifetime by the literary career of her husband, she enjoyed a posthumous revival that eluded Charles, with some of her novels being republished by Honno Ltd. as part of their Welsh Women’s Classics series and her first novel, The Battle to the Weak (1925), was republished by Parthian in 2010.