Eliza Parsons

Writing for money in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, EP produced about twenty novels comprising (she said) sixty-five volumes, which may have been reckoned to include her play and six volumes of novels translated from French. All her fiction is didactic, and the works which are not sentimental are gothic. She began as a heavy-handed stylist and never ceased to over-write, but she was skilled in hooking and holding readers. She was popular with the public though she had to be content with faint praise from reviewers, who often commented on her defective grammar.