John Grange was the author of one of the most stylistically flamboyant and idiosyncratic works of Elizabethan prose fiction, The Golden Aphroditis (1577). The book is one of a series of experimental fictions produced in England during the 1570s by writers, such as George Gascoigne, George Pettie, and John Lyly, who contributed to and took advantage of the increasing sophistication with which the Elizabethan public engaged in the act of reading. The Golden Aphroditis contains important evidence of the influences and preoccupations that helped to shape these experimental fictions.

According to the registry for Queen's College, Oxford, a John Grange of London matriculated in January 1575 at the age of eighteen. If this person is the author of The Golden Aphroditis , he, like Pettie, Lyly, and other authors of prose fiction from Oxford, may have been influenced by the complex prose style used by John Rainolds, tutor at Corpus Christi...