Sophie Beal
I blame Jane Austen for the fact my first novel is still on my hard drive. I read her books over and over again in my teens and twenties. It showed when I tried to write. If she could get away with three chapters of uninterrupted backstory, or several coincidences to move her plot along, surely I could. But she wrote her books over two centuries ago. Nowadays they might never have made it off the slush pile.