Elizabeth Hamilton

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Standard Name: Hamilton, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Hamilton
Nickname: Eliza Hamilton
In her own day EH was best known and loved for My Ain Fireside (a song expressive of national Scottish feeling and the glorification of the domestic) and for Cottagers of Glenburnie, 1808, a novel of domestic improvement. In later generations her satire on the Jacobins has got her type-cast as an unmitigated conservative. In fact her writings in many genres (poems, novels, essays, biography, and writings on education, religion, and philosophy) combine a scholarly and an ironic bent, and her conservatism includes a strong streak of feminism. Her novels make less use than most of the marriage plot, and she presents single women as strong and admirable.
Portrait of Elizabeth Hamilton by Sir Henry Raeburn. The dark but vivid painting suits her olive skin and curly, dark (unpowdered) hair. She is wearing red velvet with a matching kerchief on her head, and holding some small object in her hands.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Lucy Aikin
LA met Elizabeth Hamilton while visiting Edinburgh.
Feminist Companion Archive.
Intertextuality and Influence Lucy Aikin
Her model for this genre was Elizabeth Hamilton , but the influence of Catharine Macaulay is discerned by Karen O'Brien in Aikin's Whig positioning and in her self-confidently judgemental tone.
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press.
218
This work was reissued...
Family and Intimate relationships Archibald Alison
His father , who confusingly bore the same name as his best-known son, was a clergyman, a writer on the subject of taste, and the dedicatee of Elizabeth Hamilton 's A Series of Popular Essays...
Textual Production Jane Austen
JA wrote of this novel, I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child.
Honan, Park. Jane Austen: Her Life. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
285
She published it as a Lady: the only one issued this way, since later...
Literary responses Jane Austen
Some Austen news items are regrettable. In an interview with the Royal Geographical Society in June 2011, V.S. Naipaul , in asserting his own superiority to women writers (and claiming he could tell male from...
Textual Production Anna Letitia Barbauld
The importance of politics in ALB 's journalism is shown by her declining an invitation from Maria Edgeworth in 1804 to associate herself with a journal written entirely by women, on the grounds that the...
Family and Intimate relationships Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Among EOB 's literary friends, Elizabeth Hamilton was special. When Benger mentions Hamilton's delight in fostering unprotected talent, especially female talent, she is probably thinking of her own. She prints letters which are almost certainly...
Textual Production Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB paid tribute to a close friend in Memoirs of the late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton.
Quarterly Review. J. Murray.
18: 542
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Having already praised many contemporary women writers in print, EOB was now able to meet them. The move to London was accomplished principally through the zealous friendship of Miss Sarah Wesley , who had already...
Intertextuality and Influence Henrietta Maria Bowdler
Although HMB was provoked to write by William Hayley 's unpleasant Philosophical, Historical and Moral Essay on Old Maids, 1785, she gives a mixed message. This begins with an epigraph drawn from Elizabeth Hamilton
Textual Features Lady Eleanor Butler
Particularly worthy of mention is a jaunty, witty, perceptive Hymn to Diana, which addresses the goddess of chastity in the manner of a litany, with a string of petitions. Since Diana has decreed, says...
Textual Features Medora Gordon Byron
The fictional spinster here finds Miss Byron's bachelor sympathetic but querulous, and decides to make clear by a parallel account that unmarried women are not like that. I declare, on the honour of a...
Textual Production Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne
Purdie and Smith worked at the behest of an all-female editorial committee
McGuirk, Carol. “Jacobite History to National Song: Robert Burns and Carolina Oliphant (Baroness Nairne)”. The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Vol.
47
, No. 2/3, pp. 253-87.
258
The anthology came out in six volumes, printing the music along with the words of its songs; its editor was the greatest...
Friends, Associates Maria Edgeworth
In Edinburgh she met Professor Dugald Stewart , his wife Helen , and the writer Elizabeth Hamilton , with whom she developed a friendship continued by correspondence.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon.
197-9
Another writer whom she befriended closer to home was Mary Leadbeater .
Textual Production Maria Edgeworth
ME 's early letters to her friend Fanny Robinson are earnest and priggish. By the 1790s she was sending the Ruxtons letters which have literary merit in themselves (mixing amusing anecdote and expressions of affection)...

Timeline

1785: Dr George Gregory (friend of Elizabeth Hamilton)...

Building item

1785

Dr George Gregory (friend of Elizabeth Hamilton ) published with Joseph JohnsonEssays Historical and Moral, which expresses feminist and reforming sentiments.

1805: George Nicholson compiled and published at...

Women writers item

1805

George Nicholson compiled and published at Poughnill near Ludlow in ShropshireThe Advocate and Friend of Woman, an anthology of excerpts.

1816: Thomas Love Peacock published his anonymous...

Writing climate item

1816

Thomas Love Peacock published his anonymous satirical novelHeadlong Hall.

1901: The publication of George Douglas Brown's...

Writing climate item

1901

The publication of George Douglas Brown 's novel The House with the Green Shutters marked the first attack on the Scottish school of fiction that was afterwards known as Kailyard.

Texts

Hamilton, Elizabeth. Essays on the Mind. Manners and Miller, 1813.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Exercises in Religious Knowledge. 1809.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Hints to the Patrons of Schools. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. “Introduction”. Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, edited by Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell, Broadview, 1999, pp. 7-50.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. Editors Perkins, Pamela and Shannon Russell, Broadview, 1999.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Letters on Education. G. G. and J. Robinson, 1801.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Letters to the Daughter of a Nobleman. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1806.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. G. G. and J. Robinson, 1800.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. Editor Grogan, Claire, 2000.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina, the Wife of Germanicus. G. and J. Robinson, 1804.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. The Cottagers of Glenburnie. Manners and Miller, and S. Cheyne, 1808.