The English Anglo-Catholic author Evelyn Underhill is best known for her groundbreaking and accessible studies on Christian mysticism including her most famous work, Mysticism (1911), which is still read widely around the world. She resided in London and died in 1941.

Editors Bill Gillard and Robert Stauffer are co-authors of Speculative Modernism: How Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Conceived the Twentieth Century (McFarland, 2021), a scholarly study of science fiction, horror, and fantasy during the literary Modernist era. Gillard (PhD, MFA) is an award-winning professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and author of books on literary Modernism and speculative fiction, a novel, a short story collection, and volumes of poetry. Stauffer (PhD) is an associate professor of English at Dominican University New York who specializes in medieval and Renaissance literature, and has also published science-fiction short stories.