Emily Frederick Clark

01 January 1780 - 07 March 1833

EFC wrote for the support of her family (whose supposedly distinguished origins were very important to her). Between 1798 and 1819 she published four novels, a volume of poems, and another of stories. Much other work remained unpublished. The Feminist Companion summarises the pattern of her fiction as high life, partly abroad; ideal heroines happily married after undeserved suffering; villains punished, and loyal lower orders . . . thanked.

Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.

BirthName: Emily Frederick Clark
Indexed: Clarke

Milestones

By August 1798

The year after her grandfather's high-profile suicide, EFC published in two volumes with Hookham and Carpenter , by subscription, her first novel (also her first book): Ianthé, or The Flower of Caernarvon.

Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press, 2000, 2 vols.

1: 742

Fergus, Jan, and Janice Thaddeus. “Women, Publishers, and Money, 1790-1820”. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol.

, 1987, pp. 191-07.

193, n10

Biography

Birth and Family

EFC was one of four children, having two sisters and a brother. Her date of birth is unknown, but the achievement of her first novel suggests that she can hardly have been born later than 1780.