215 results for smallpox

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Lady Mary's much-loved brother died of smallpox on 1 July 1713, not yet twenty-one, leaving a wife (not chosen by himself) and two small children.
Grundy, Isobel. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment. Clarendon.
65

Sarah Scott

The fame of SS 's elder sister, Elizabeth , later eclipsed her own. They enjoyed a very close relationship while they were growing up. Their nickname the two Peas suggests how they were regarded as a matched pair. In 1734 Elizabeth entered London society as companion to her friend Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland , leaving Sarah behind on the family estate. Sarah felt deeply the loss of her sister's companionship. After Elizabeth married George Montagu in August 1742, Sarah stayed with her sister at various times until she moved in with Lady Barbara Montagu. Elizabeth also supplemented Sarah's income on many occasions. The two sisters maintained a close relationship throughout their lives.
Rizzo, Betty, and Sarah Scott. “Introduction”. The History of Sir George Ellison, University Press of Kentucky, p. ix - xlv.
x-xiii
Rizzo suggests that Sarah's relationship with her sister was a compelling preoccupation
Rizzo, Betty, and Sarah Scott. “Introduction”. The History of Sir George Ellison, University Press of Kentucky, p. ix - xlv.
x
in her life, and that she never forgave Elizabeth for abandoning her. She also suggests that the smallpox which ruined Sarah's beauty set the two sisters on different courses: Elizabeth as a bluestocking in the social limelight, and Sarah as a social activist.
Rizzo, Betty, and Sarah Scott. “Introduction”. The History of Sir George Ellison, University Press of Kentucky, p. ix - xlv.
x
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon.
33, 137

Sophia Hume

SH was a leading Quaker pamphleteer of the mid eighteenth century. She published religious and moral exhortations, an anthology, and a diatribe against smallpox inoculation, in England and America.

Bathsheba Bowers

BB had a brother who died of smallpox when she was eighteen. Her first response to his illness was terror; only when he died was she plunged into grief.
Bowers, Bathsheba. An Alarm Sounded. William Bradford.
6-7

Fanny Kemble

Depression and Smallpox

Henrietta Maria Bowdler

HMB 's sister Jane , seven years her senior and the eldest of the family, was a gifted woman, a poet whose health was ruined by smallpox at the age of sixteen and measles soon afterwards. She became a permanent invalid by 1771.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Jane Bowdler

Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford

At some time before she was married, Frances Thynne suffered from smallpox, which left her a little marked.
Hughes, Helen Sard. The Gentle Hertford, Her Life and Letters. Macmillan.
15

Annie Keary

Helen Neale, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, first hears of Father Phim as someone after whom her brother Hilary, as an irritating joke, insists on calling her: fat Father Phelemy Phim Philip M'Quirk.
Keary, Annie. Father Phim. Editor Avery, Gillian, Faith Press.
26
But when she is sent from her urban English home to convalesce at her grandfather's estate in Ireland after having had smallpox, Father Phim (the local Roman Catholic priest) becomes her best friend, while Helen herself becomes a friend and then a defender of her grandfather's tenants, and the estate bailiff, Mr O'Rhea, becomes the object of her hatred. The story is set in the time of the Great Famine, and the hardships of the tenants' lives are a shock to Helen.

Dorothy Osborne

DO , now in London to prepare for her wedding to Sir William Temple , was ill with smallpox.
Osborne, Dorothy. The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple. Editor Smith, G. C. Moore, Clarendon Press.
183

Sarah Savage

SS was attacked by smallpox in 1688, but survived. As she grew older her sight deteriorated until she could not read a word without glasses (which made her consider that she ought to spend more time in prayer and meditation instead of reading).
Williams, Sir John Bickerton, and Sarah Savage. Memoirs of the Life and Character of Mrs. Sarah Savage. Holdsworth and Ball.
127

Alice Thornton

She mentions having measles, and two attacks of smallpox (which would mean that one of them must have been chickenpox).
Anselment, Raymond A. “Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Sources of Alice Thornton’s Life”. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol.
45
, No. 1, pp. 135-55.
154n7
Graham, Elspeth et al., editors. Her Own Life. Routledge.
150-1

Caroline Bowles

Smallpox

Anne Bradstreet

Smallpox

Frances Browne

Smallpox

Anne Burke

Her marriage may have been short-lived. By 9 October 1795 she was a widow with a young son to support. She had just suffered the alarm of his going through a smallpox attack, but he survived.
Archives of the Royal Literary Fund, 1790-1918.

Frances Burney

Among the pleasures of FB 's life-writing are the way it revels in nonce-words and other innovative uses of language, and the play it makes with dramatic techniques like scene-setting and dialogue. Many famous passages reflect her vivid apprehension of the world around her, and her ability to capture it in language: the sequence about her entry into the limelight as a published author; her accounts of Johnson and other famous figures; her moonlight conversation with the mad king after he had pursued her and she had run away; steady attendance at the trial of Warren Hastings ; the harrowing detail of her unanaethetized mastectomy; the turmoil of living in Brussels when the armies gathered before, and came back in broken fragments after, the battle of Waterloo. She is a perceptive delineator of people: in sketches of suitors both longed-for and unwanted—in which, however, discretion and reticence somewhat mute the story—of her husband's vegetable gardening, or her small son getting his inoculation for smallpox. She is, besides, equally skilled in rendering interiority: her early painting of scenes in which romantic interest is hinted or implied rather than expressed; the ups and downs of her whirlwind, bilingual, middle-aged courtship; the feelings with which, as an elderly wife, she watched from an upstairs window her beloved, also elderly husband mount his horse and ride off with the French monarchist army; and those with which she made her way, alone, among real, unpredictable dangers to join him.

Catharine Burton

At the age of sixteen CB survived an attack of smallpox, but the year after that she fell seriously ill again (having just been practising severe religious abstinence). She was ill for seven years, with all kinds of symptoms including giddiness, spots on the skin, stomach pains, failure of appetite, shaking fits, and, she says, her bones moving out of their proper places. Her account of the remedies used on her is painfully vivid: bitter potions, sweats, vomits, bleeding, and Spanish flies,
Burton, Catharine. An English Carmelite: The Life of Catharine Burton. Editors Hunter, Thomas and Henry James Coleridge, Burns and Oates.
35
as well as vinegar on her blisters.
Burton, Catharine. An English Carmelite: The Life of Catharine Burton. Editors Hunter, Thomas and Henry James Coleridge, Burns and Oates.
38
She recovered immediately when she vowed to become a nun, and found that, for instance, her previously rigid fingers were now pliable.
Burton, Catharine. An English Carmelite: The Life of Catharine Burton. Editors Hunter, Thomas and Henry James Coleridge, Burns and Oates.
80
She therefore attributed her cure to a miracle, and thought all I could do for God too little.
Burton, Catharine. An English Carmelite: The Life of Catharine Burton. Editors Hunter, Thomas and Henry James Coleridge, Burns and Oates.
83
It does not appear that she was ever ill again, unless perhaps trivially, until shortly before her death.
Grundy, Isobel. “Women’s History? Writings by English Nuns”. Women, Writing, History 1640-1740, edited by Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman, Batsford and University of Georgia Press, pp. 126-38.
129

Anne Conway

AC suffered a severe fever before the age of twelve, which seems to have brought on a tendency to excruciating headaches. These (probably migraine) recurred throughout her life, so often as to be almost permanent. Her all-round health, too, was fragile,
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, and Anne Conway. “Prologue”. The Conway Letters, edited by Sarah Hutton and Sarah Hutton, Clarendon Press, p. xxiii - xxix.
xxvii and n6
Conway, Anne et al. The Conway Letters. Editor Hutton, Sarah, Clarendon Press.
15-16
and the medical treatments she underwent for her headaches sound in themselves enough to ensure ill-health. She went down with smallpox shortly after her only child died of it.
Hutton, Sarah. Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher. Cambridge University Press.
32

E. A. Dillwyn

Elizabeth (Bessie) De la Beche Dillwyn , EAD 's mother, was moneyed and unconventional. She died in 1866 of smallpox.
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.

Isak Dinesen

Bror had originally bought them seven hundred acres of land only recently appropriated for development by white settlers. He then sold that and bought the four-and-a-half-thousand-acre coffee plantation in the Ngong Hills in what is now Kenya, despite knowing nothing about growing coffee. They started with twelve hundred black field hands and six European managers. Their company was called the Swedo-African Coffee Company until it was incorporated as the Karen Coffee Company , backed by ID 's family. She became its effective manager.
Thurman, Judith. Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller. St Martin’s Press.
107, 141
Her difficulties in running the operation included basic climatological ones (the land turned out to be a fraction too high for coffee and the soil too acidic),
as well as a series of droughts and an outbreak of smallpox.

Ann, Lady Fanshawe

The child lived only fifteen days, and before those fifteen days were over Ann's husband had to part with her for the first time since their wedding, and leave for Bristol. She had a total of six sons and eight daughters borne and christned between this date and 6 August 1665.
Ann, Lady Fanshawe, et al. “The Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe”. The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett, and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, edited by John Loftis and John Loftis, Clarendon Press, pp. 101-92.
106
But deaths of children followed hard on births, and within about a year of her last childbirth there had been nine deaths: a few in infancy, but several others after surviving well into their childhood. ALF had also miscarried four times. One of her miscarriages followed the death of her then eldest son of smallpox, when she says she neglected her daughters, struck down by the same epidemic, to tend her son.
Ann, Lady Fanshawe, et al. “The Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe”. The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett, and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, edited by John Loftis and John Loftis, Clarendon Press, pp. 101-92.
114, 119, 120, 121, 129, 135-7, 139, 141
Halkett, Anne, and Ann, Lady Fanshawe. “Note on the Text; A Chronology of Sir Richard Fanshawe and Ann, Lady Fanshawe”. The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, edited by John Loftis, Clarendon Press, pp. 91-9.
96-8

Eliza Haywood

It was advertised as intended for the younger and politer Sort of Ladies,
Haywood, Eliza. The Female Spectator. Xerox University Microfilms.
1: 5
though the reader is conventionally referred to as he. Advertising and other publicity was on a larger scale than for any other of Haywood's works. It ran for two years: twenty-four numbers.
Spedding, Patrick. A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood. Pickering and Chatto.
432-3
White, Cynthia L. Women’s Magazines 1693-1968. Michael Joseph.
28
Publishing anonymously, EH claimed to chair a committee of women: several members of one body, of which I am the mouth.
Haywood, Eliza. The Female Spectator. Xerox University Microfilms.
1: 5
Doubt that this could really be women's writing is voiced more than once, over the name of male correspondents. A frontispiece depicts the authors gathered at a tea-table (the sign of Fame visible behind them in the top of the picture). The editor is a sober, middle-aged woman who was a coquette in her youth. Others in the club include Mira, a society widow (wearing black in the illustration), and Euphrosine, a merchant's daughter who after losing her beauty to smallpox (as Samuel Johnson 's Victoria does in a fiction of a few years later) has acquired intellectual interests (thereby allowing her sister to take over the role of their mother's favourite).

Elizabeth Helme

The opening scene identifies the heroine, Elizabeth Neville, then not yet sixteen, as a virtuous woman: she is first seen walking (together with the parson's two sons, Charles and Henry Willoughby) behind the coffin of a faithful domestic who had worked for her recently-deceased grandmother at her manor house (in a village six miles from Durham) and has died of smallpox. Elizabeth is contrasted with her mother, Lady Neville, and her younger sister, who are coincidentally approaching in a splendid carriage, accompanied by a number of out-riders in gay and costly liveries.
Helme, Elizabeth. Modern Times. P. Norbury.
1: 3
Lady Neville expresses snobbish horror at her daughter publicly mourning a low person in low company: she and her younger daughter, Fanny, are also selfishly frightened of catching smallpox. Only an uncle, General Sir Charles Neville, jumps down to join the funeral party. He had once wished to marry into the Willoughby family, and has cause to abhor the stiff-necked family pride of his own. Over the course of a long story, however, the values of Elizabeth and Sir Charles prevail The novel ends with the marriages of Elizabeth and Fanny to Charles and Henry Willoughby, for Fanny has repented her selfishness and been reclaimed for the domestic virtues. Her redemption comes about even though as a girl in the West Indies (where her father was Governor of an island) she had caused the death of a slave, Juba, whom she had commanded to dive into the sea and retrieve a whip. Juba is killed by a sea-monster, which Fanny's Newfoundland dog must have sensed when he broke his habit of obedience and refused to retrieve the whip. The incident closed horribly with the dog retrieving the mangled remains of the slave.
Helme, Elizabeth. Modern Times. P. Norbury.
1: 58-63
In the end good examples work more strongly on Fanny than this awful warning.

Elizabeth Montagu

Elizabeth Robinson (later EM ) was sent away from home to protect her from catching smallpox from her sister, Sarah .
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon.
38