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.
Professionally, Morgan was a notable success. She was a canny businesswoman, never afraid to assert herself against an established publisher or seek out a new one. This paid off in a remarkable level of earnings...
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)...
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...
Literary responses
Helen Maria Williams
It talked of the need to counter her poisonous false philosophy with antidotes from the writings of a More
, a Hamilton
, and a West
.
Michael-Johnston, Georgina. Helen Maria Williams: Liberty, Sensibility, and Education. University of Alberta.
140
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
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Tabitha Tenney
Neither the Cumberland episode, nor her father's death, nor her own serious illness brought on by grief, can change Dorcasina. She next fancies that a new servant, John Brown, is a lover in disguise. (The...
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...
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...
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...
Friends, Associates
Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
She knew other distinguished writers from the previous generation too, and her friends both before and after her marriage included many in the world of literature. A couple of years after this she spent the...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Smith
They met and spent time with Elizabeth Hamilton
and her sister, Katherine Blake
, when these two visited the Lakes in May 1802.
Smith, Elizabeth. Fragments, in Prose and Verse. Editor Bowdler, Henrietta Maria, Richard Cruttwell.
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
.
Friends, Associates
Lucy Aikin
LA
met Elizabeth Hamilton
while visiting Edinburgh.
Feminist Companion Archive.
Friends, Associates
Mary Martha Sherwood
MMS
judged Anna Seward
to be greedy for flattery, especially from the opposite sex. In 1799 she met Hannah More
, who was then at the height of her fame and to whom admittance was...
