Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Hester Lynch Piozzi
-
Standard Name: Piozzi, Hester Lynch
Birth Name: Hester Lynch Salusbury
Married Name: Hester Lynch Thrale
Married Name: Hester Lynch Piozzi
Pseudonym: H: L: T.
Pseudonym: An Old Acquaintance of the Public
Pseudonym: An Old Woman
Self-constructed Name: H: L: P.
Used Form: Hester Thrale
Hester Lynch Thrale, later Hester Lynch Piozzi
, was by inclination and practice a woman of letters as well as a woman of the world. She loved recording facts and details; she was an incisive critic (of real learning) and a great entertainer. She wrote poems, translations, essays, letters, journals, memoirs, and works of scholarship, and she published both during the later eighteenth and during the earlier nineteenth century.
Her later friendships often blended the personal with the political, like those with Beilby Porteus
(Bishop of London from 1787, where she met him) and the abolitionists William Wilberforce
(met at Bath the same year)...
Literary responses
Hannah More
Percy was a great hit, with twenty-one performances, and 4,000 copies sold by March 1777. HM
made £600 from it in the theatre, and £150 from Cadell
for the copyright. She thought, however, the public...
Reception
Hannah More
Not all responses were positive: according to Hester Lynch Thrale
, this work of HM
's caused boys at the elite Westminster School
to burn her in effigy.
Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press.
113
Publishing
Hannah More
By 23 July 1794, following the appearance of Paine's The Age of Reason, Porteus was urging More to write on the evidences of Christianity in the style of her Village Politics. She declined...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Montagu
The leading figures in the movement were Montagu herself (who spent freely in hospitality, and who was later dubbed the Queen of the Bluestockings or Queen of the Blues) and Carter
(the most intellectually...
A TLS review by R. W. Chapman
sounded distinctly anti-feminist. He wrote that by employing heroic remedies, the indomitable editor has cut away all the elaborate openings and studied conclusions, masses of domestic detail, nine-tenths...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Montagu
The patriotism of EM
's riposte ensured its enthusiastic reception. Readers (among them a brother of Elizabeth Carter
, who refrained from enlightening him) assumed that the anonymity of this authoritative critical voice concealed a...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Montagu
EM
met and became friends with Hester Thrale (later Piozzi
).
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon.
255-7
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Montagu
EM
met Frances Burney
at Hester Thrale
's house, Streatham Park, near London.
Hemlow, Joyce. The History of Fanny Burney. Clarendon.
106-7
Reception
Alice Meynell
AM
's diligent recuperation of women's literary history nonetheless marks her as a predecessor of some of Woolf's feminist concerns. They both wrote about some of the same women, including, for example, Jonathan Swift's Stella...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mrs Martin
Indeed, as in MM
's previous novels, the narrative technique contributes largely to the reader's enjoyment. The narrator addresses the reader as dear Madam, then (without modifying this address) invites her to call the narrator...
Friends, Associates
Margaret Bingham, Countess Lucan
She was a well-known figure in London cultural circles, particularly that of the Bluestockings. Charles Burney
called her at-home evenings blue conversazioni's and Horace Walpole
called them quite Mazarine-blue. Others specifically mentioned in...
Friends, Associates
Harriet Lee
Hester Lynch Piozzi
became a particularly close friend of HL
within a year of their first meeting.
Lee, Sophia. “Introduction”. The Recess, edited by April Alliston, University Press of Kentucky, p. ix - lii.
xxxii-xxxiii
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Family and Intimate relationships
Harriet Lee
Hester Lynch Piozzi
was trying unsuccessfully to bring about a marriage between HL
and the widowed marchese Ludovico Trotti
, who seemed to be in love with her.
Piozzi, Hester Lynch. The Piozzi Letters. Editors Bloom, Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom, University of Delaware Press; Associated University Presses.
