Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Elizabeth Hamilton
-
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.
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)...
Literary responses
Maria Edgeworth
The Critical Review notice on Leonora began with oblique reference to Elizabeth Hamilton
's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
3d ser. 7 (1806): 215
It judged that the whole novel is written with great spirit...
Publishing
Maria Edgeworth
From early in her publishing career ME
sent out into the world short pieces as well as longer ones and collections of her own. In this way she placed stories in miscellaneous volumes (The...
EF
developed a close friendship and a correspondence with Elizabeth Hamilton
.
Fletcher, Eliza. Autobiography of Mrs. Fletcher, of Edinburgh. Editor Mary, Lady Richardson, Printed at the offices of C. Thurman for private circulation.
78
Textual Production
Ann Taylor Gilbert
She altered the magazine's policy, reviewing Mary Brunton
's Self-Control, and then Maria Edgeworth
's Tales, I forget which series,
Gilbert, Ann Taylor. Autobiography and Other Memorials of Mrs. Gilbert. Editor Gilbert, Josiah, H. S. King, http://U of A, HSS Ruth N .
1: 203
although until then it had not been customary in that work...
This contains autobiographical fragments and insightful comments on other women writers. Objects of AG
's comment include Susan Ferrier
, Charlotte Smith
(whose poems AG
felt to be easy, flowing, and correct, but low on...
Textual Features
Sarah Green
The novel itself has elements of a spoof on the gothic, a didactic courtship plot, a social satire of the dialogue kind associated with Elizabeth Hamilton
and Thomas Love Peacock
, a sentimental melodrama, a...
Friends, Associates
Mary Hays
This was her most formative and most famous friendship. She had approached Wollstonecraft after the latter published Vindication of the Rights of Woman early that same year. Wollstonecraft proved a valuable professional mentor. Another relationship...
Literary responses
Mary Hays
This time most reviews were respectful: the Analytical of course, the Monthly (in which William Taylor
noted that the novel was a cut above the common run, with serious and unusual moral teaching to impart)...
Textual Features
Mary Hays
The plot follows the life-stories of two sisters (somewhat crudely distinguished for worldly selfishness on the one hand and prudent, generous sincerity on the other) and their brother, who is a spendthrift like his frivolous...
Intertextuality and Influence
Eliza Haywood
A more recent generation of feminist scholars has succeeded in locating EH
in the developing tradition of women's fiction. Critic Mary Anne Schofield
has argued that her heroines are feisty feminists. Paula Backscheider
points out...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Helme
The work includes an account of the Hottentots (in whose society all are equal, without distinction of rank, and where marriages are made for as long as the two parties shall be content with the...
