Sir Herbert Croft

Born in 1751, Herbert Croft was an English author, barrister, and clergyman who later became the 5th Baronet. He is chiefly remembered for Love and Madness, an epistolary novel based on the shocking murder of Martha Ray by James Hackman; the book became his best-known work.

Croft studied at Oxford and entered Lincoln's Inn, and over the course of his life he moved between the worlds of law, religion, and literature. He was also connected with important literary figures of his time, including Samuel Johnson, and built a reputation as a writer of varied interests rather than a single-book author.

He inherited the baronetcy in 1797, though not the wealth one might expect from the title, and he died in 1816. Today he is remembered less as a grand society figure than as a restless, versatile man of letters whose most famous book captured the dark fascination of late eighteenth-century Britain.