Elizabeth Isabella Spence

12 January 1768 - 27 July 1832

Standard Name: Spence, Elizabeth Isabella

Indexed Name: Miss Spence

Pseudonym: A Lady

Pseudonym: The Author of Summer Excursions . . . .

EIS began publishing just before the end of the eighteenth century and continued for twenty-five years. She issued novels, shorter fiction, and travel books, the latter put together from letters sent to friends in the course of summer excursions around England, Wales, and Scotland (her native country). Her fiction sometimes draws on anecdotes from life, both recent and historical or pseudo-historical. As an author she is not distinguished, but her interest in circulating information about other women writers gives her some significance for women's literary history.

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Connections

Connections Sort ascending	Author name	Excerpt
Textual Production	Christian Milne	CM continued to write after her volume appeared. From about 1810 she was too ill and too busy to write much: I am obliged to descend from Parnassus, as she put it, and spend her...
Textual Features	Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck	MAS adds a new aesthetic category, the contemplative sublime, alongside the Burke an or terrible sublime and other categories related to the Burkean beautiful. She derives her thinking from women as well as men. In...
Residence	Marianne Chambers	She seems to have gone on living in Bristol, with which Elizabeth Isabella Spence identified her in 1809. Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Summer Excursions. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme. 71
Reception	Christian Gray	Scottish middle-class writer Elizabeth Isabella Spence transcribed Bessy Bell and Mary Gray during a visit to Scotland in 1816 from her home in England. She printed it in 1817 in her Letters from the North...
Publishing	Ann Batten Cristall	Subscribers included Anna Letitia Barbauld and her brother , Ann Jebb , the future Amelia Opie , Anna Maria Porter , Mary Wollstonecraft and her sister, Mary Hays and her sister, a Mrs Spence who...
Literary responses	Catharine Macaulay	This reflective, original work had an important influence on Mary Wollstonecraft . Wollstonecraft wrote the notice of it in the Analytical Review, calling the author the woman of the greatest abilities . ....
Literary responses	Christian Milne	CM knew from harsh experience that for a labouring-class woman, publishing poems invited personal criticism (as Elizabeth Hands in England had understood). She says she met with encouragement from patrons but that her neighbours assumed...
Literary responses	Marianne Chambers	The Critical Review, oddly, thought the play lacked comedy and had succeeded on stage because of its morality. It judged it a highly creditable first attempt, and hoped that MC would one day or...
Literary responses	Eliza Fletcher	During her lifetime EF acquired a literary reputation for her life rather than her works. Elizabeth Isabella Spence wrote of her as the Mrs. Montague of Edinburgh, who combined intellect with virtue and made...
Literary responses	Mary Robinson	On her deathbed MR regretted that most of her works had been composed in too much haste, Robinson, Mary. Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson. Editor Levy, Moses Joseph, Peter Owen. 151 and declared that if, against all expectation, she should survive, she would begin a new long work...
Literary responses	Margaret Holford	Elizabeth Isabella Spence praised this poem in print not long after its appearance (though she conceded that its view of Wallace was not so accurate as that of Jane Porter 's almost contemporaneous rendering in...
Literary responses	Ann Yearsley	Elizabeth Isabella Spence , reporting on a visit to Bristol, mentions AY as an example of an obscure woman writer of genius. Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Summer Excursions. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme. 71 In 1990 Donna Landry wrote of her complex contradictions under the heading...
Health	Ann Radcliffe	Rictor Norton believes that AR may have suffered a nervous breakdown in 1803, after finishing Gaston de Blondeville, and another in late 1812, after the publishing of Anna Seward 's letters alleging that she...
Friends, Associates	Christian Milne	CM was visited at her home by the novelist and travel-writer Elizabeth Isabella Spence (who was Scots-born though living in England, and who took a great interest both in her life-story and in her poetry). Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Letters from the North Highlands, During the Summer 1816. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown. 52
Friends, Associates	Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger	At the same period EOB was a friend of another miscellaneous writer, Elizabeth Isabella Spence , who entertained in the same eccentric, low-budget style. These two elderly ladies (Spence was ten years older than Benger)...

Timeline

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Texts

Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. A Traveller’s Tale of the Last Century. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1819.

Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Dame Rebecca Berry. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green , 1827.

Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Helen Sinclair. T. Cadell, jun. and W. Davies, 1799.

Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. How to be Rid of a Wife, and The Lily of Annandale: Tales. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1823.

Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Letters from the North Highlands, During the Summer 1816. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817.

Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Old Stories. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, Paternoster-Row, 1822.

Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Sketches of the Present Manners, Customs, and Scenery of Scotland. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1811.

Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Summer Excursions. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1809.

Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. The Curate and His Daughter; A Cornish Tale. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, Paternoster-Row, 1813.

Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. The Nobility of the Heart. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1805.

Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. The Spanish Guitar. W. McDowall, 1814.

Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. The Wedding Day. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807.