Ann Pearson has a B.A. in French from the University of London and a Ph. D from the University of British Columbia where in the course of her career she taught French, women’s literature, and an introductory Humanities course covering great works from antiquity to the postmodern. Her background research into Napoleonic Italy for A Promise on the Horizon involved much time in libraries, but after perusing innumerable eighteenth and nineteenth century travellers’ accounts of Italy, she had the pleasure of visiting Stendhal’s birthplace, Grenoble, and following Napoleon’s road through the Simplon Pass to Lake Maggiore, Varese, Milan, and eventually Rome.