Elizabeth Helme

EH began publishing in the 1780s to supplement her family's income. She issued ten novels with her name or some other means of (at least later) identification, three translations, and a number of didactic and pedagogical works for the young, She told the Royal Literary Fund that she had translated sixteen volumes for different booksellers [that is publishers] without my name, which suggests that some remain unidentified. Her novels abound in cliché but deploy their derivative plots, characters, and diction with attractive energy and conviction. She is interested in problems of class, race, and social justice, though given to finding easy fictional solutions for them.