215 results for smallpox

Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke

Mary Sidney's mother, the former Lady Mary Dudley , came from a powerful family. Her brothers, all players on the national scene, included Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. She lost her beauty by smallpox when her daughter Mary was a toddler.
Waller, Gary F. Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: A Critical Study of Her Writings and Literary Milieu. University of Salzburg, http://BLC.
6
Hannay, Margaret P. Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. Oxford University Press, http://U of A HSS.
17-8

Laetitia Pilkington

LP survived smallpox as a small child.
Pilkington, Laetitia. Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington. Editor Elias, A. C., University of Georgia Press.
1: 13

F. Mabel Robinson

The title-page bears a quotation from Samuel Taylor Coleridge 's Love about a fiend with the appearance of an angel beautiful and bright.
Robinson, F. Mabel. The Plan of Campaign. Methuen.
title-page
In the novel, set in Ireland, politics are a constant background presence, but personal relations are the centre. The opening scene of guests arriving at a social gathering offers FMR the chance to introduce and describe most of her cast of characters. They include both members of parliament and agitators, both Irish nationalists and those who believe that Ireland can never be a nation. Questions like Home Rule, and the plunge in the value of Irish produce in the face of imports from all around Europe: such questions shape the context of the story, while the narrative centres on friendships and courtships. The angel/fiend of the Coleridge quotation is Elinor Fetherston, a dazzlingly beautiful young woman from a large family, who has debts and needs to marry, who has ambitions and needs to charm and conquer. Her female foil is the grey-eyed Stella Considine, who has strong political opinions (she cannot abide a landlord) and a beautiful singing voice, and is solving her own money problems by teaching music, with a secret elation at her own earning power. Among a network of male characters two stand out. Richard Talbot is gloomy, dignified, and restrained in manner, once very handsome but now grotesquely marked by smallpox, an able man who grasps political intricacies and makes up his mind in an instant, a man of whom strangers are afraid.
Robinson, F. Mabel. The Plan of Campaign. Methuen.
37
Titus Orr, his foil, is a broad, compact young man, a personage to love and trust at first sight,
Robinson, F. Mabel. The Plan of Campaign. Methuen.
16
who sees the complexities of political issues and hesitates before them, unable to decide for want of power to see the future.
Robinson, F. Mabel. The Plan of Campaign. Methuen.
203-4

Lady Rachel Russell

She herself suffered an attack of measles the same year as her miscarriage, and one of smallpox in 1660.

Mary Shelley

MS contracted smallpox while visiting Paris; but she survived.
Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. Routledge.
xviii

Catherine Sinclair

Politician, agriculturalist, and statistician Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster , first baronet (1754-1835), used to joke that he had six-and-thirty feet of daughters.
Walford, Lucy. Recollections of a Scottish Novelist. Williams and Norgate.
19
This was a way of putting the the fact that all of his six daughters, including Catherine, were about six feet tall. In fact, the pathway outside the Sinclair home in Edinburgh, paved with enormous slabs of stone brought from the family home in Caithness, was colloquially called the Giants' Causeway. Sir John, immortalized in a Raeburn portrait, was well known for the pioneering work which resulted in The Statistical Account of Scotland, published in 1791-9. As Catherine Sinclair's great-niece Lucy Walford recollected, he was also known as a wonderful person, and many of his children, including Catherine, inherited his appealing temperament. However, as an amateur man of science Sir John insisted on carrying out himself the inoculation of several of his daughters for smallpox, only to be dismayed at the result—for some were marked for life—he urged upon the doctor to skin their faces, and was furious at a refusal.
Walford, Lucy. Recollections of a Scottish Novelist. Williams and Norgate.
18-20

Anne Wharton

AW 's father, Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley Park, about four miles from Woodstock, Oxfordshire, died of smallpox before she was born. His family had connections with Elizabeth Cary (Lady Falkland) , Lucy Hutchinson , and Katherine Philips .
Wharton, Anne. “Introduction”. The Surviving Works of Anne Wharton, edited by Germaine Greer and Selina Hastings, Stump Cross Books, pp. 1-124.
21-2

Anne Audland

AA 's daughter from her second marriage, Sarah Camm, died of smallpox, at eleven days short of her ninth birthday.
Mack, Phyllis. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England. University of California Press.
397, 401

Isabella Beeton

An anonymous doctor was credited in IB 's preface with the authorship of both The Rearing and Management of Children, and Diseases of Infancy and Childhood and the medical chapter.
Beeton, Isabella. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Editor Humble, Nicola, Oxford University Press.
4
The former chapter supports maternal breastfeeding and smallpox vaccination, now made mandatory by the state, and focuses on infant physiology, development, and illnesses, rather than all aspects of childrearing.
Beeton, Isabella. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Editor Humble, Nicola, Oxford University Press.
490, 511
The Doctor contains numerous treatments and remedies for common illnesses such as cholera, even including instructions on how to bleed a patient in an apoplectic emergency if a doctor is unobtainable.
Beeton, Isabella. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Editor Humble, Nicola, Oxford University Press.
526
Other portions of the Book of Household Management also touch on medical matters, such as the section on Invalid Cookery, the discussions of the duties of nurses and wet nurses, and the general emphasis on sanitation. In her discussion of nursemaids, IB quotes Florence Nightingale 's Notes on Nursing in support of good hygeine, nutrition, and fresh air.
Beeton, Isabella. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Editor Humble, Nicola, Oxford University Press.
466
The legal chapter, contributed by a lawyer, is short and mostly matter-of-fact, summarizing the practical aspects of such matters as leases, debts, wills, and the legal status of women. Unlike the bulk of the book, it assumes a male rather than a female reader.

Mary Matilda Betham

Catharine Macaulay , she insists, was pleasing and delicate in her person, and a woman of great feeling and indisputable abilities, though the democratic spirit of her writings has made them fall into disrepute.
Feminist Companion Archive.
She makes no critical comment on the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft (Mrs Godwin), for whom her sources were contemporary magazines, but refuses to criticise her actions. She calls her [t]his singular woman and writes matter-of-factly: [u]ncomfortable at home, she left it. (Since MMB had done the same, she would not be likely to disapprove.) With equal matter-of-factness she identifies Eliza Haywood 's latter and best works.
Feminist Companion Archive.
She is discreet about Mary Robinson and spiritedly defends Sappho against imputations with which her memory is loaded and which may be due, she says, to the malice of Ovid . (On the other hand she swallows whole the story of Sappho choosing to die for love of Phaon). She is a brisk, effective critic and historian. Jane Shore she sums up as famous for her Beauty, Wit, Misfortunes, and Penitence.
Feminist Companion Archive.
The characteristics of Susanna Centlivre 's plays are bustle, spirit, and plot. Macaulay's history is a violent attack on the whole race of the Stuarts.
Feminist Companion Archive.
Mention of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu causes her to compute the number of lives so far saved by smallpox inoculation at 139,652. She effectively marshals her scholarly arguments to maintain that Dorothy, Lady Pakington , was the real author of The Whole Duty of Man.

Susanna Blamire

She survived a bout of smallpox in her youth which left her somewhat marked.

Muriel Box

MB 's mother had married her father on the rebound, and they were incompatible by temperament, although both equally opinionated, forthright, and tactless.
Box, Muriel. Odd Woman Out. Leslie Frewin.
20
Bertie found early in the marriage that Charles had gambled away the joint savings they were setting aside for a house. They had constant acrimonious quarrels about money until he allowed her to take control of his salary, allotting him only a little pocket money.
Box, Muriel. Odd Woman Out. Leslie Frewin.
16
After this they found other things to quarrel about. Charles had an affair when Muriel was still a baby, and after this the couple became sexually estranged.
Box, Muriel. Odd Woman Out. Leslie Frewin.
22-3
On one occasion Charles Baker was goaded to hit Bertie, then slammed out of the house, leaving her to sing lugubrious hymns all day.
Box, Muriel. Odd Woman Out. Leslie Frewin.
17
One of the rare things they agreed on was going through the rigmarole of conscientious objection so that their children did not have to be vaccinated against smallpox.
Box, Muriel. Odd Woman Out. Leslie Frewin.
21

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

It tells the story of a rich heiress who takes in and refines a beautiful London flower-seller. In present-day Kent on the Castle estate of her ancient aristocratic family, Lady Lucille Ingleshaw, aged seventeen, encounters squalid, nameless poverty
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. “Flower and Weed”. The Mistletoe Bough, J. and R. Maxwell.
9
in the form of a beautiful, emaciated girl of her own age, whom she finds sleeping exhaustedly in the grounds and takes home to nurse. The servants are horrified. One calls the girl, who knows herself only as Bess, offal.
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. “Flower and Weed”. The Mistletoe Bough, J. and R. Maxwell.
10
The governess clearly thinks she is either a fallen woman or worse. She tries to prevent contact between the two, exclaiming, in what readers would have recognized as an allusion to the legislation of prostitution through the Contagious Diseases Acts: She may have some contagious disease—smallpox, perhaps.
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. “Flower and Weed”. The Mistletoe Bough, J. and R. Maxwell.
11
Her protégée does indeed transmit scarlet fever to Lady Lucille (who almost dies from it), but she is, as in Shaw 's Pygmalion, cleaned up, renamed Elizabeth May, and installed in the house in the shifting role of servant, pupil, nurse, and companion to her rescuer. When a maid offers herself as a model, the sharp-witted (and we later learn, Radical) Elizabeth retorts You're the pattern I'm to cut myself out upon? I'd rather look higher, and imitate Lady Lucille.
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. “Flower and Weed”. The Mistletoe Bough, J. and R. Maxwell.
19

Elizabeth (Cavendish) Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater

These prose writings, predominantly religious in tone, are like Jane Cavendish 's writings almost all connected with family. Here, however, the family is not a network of individuals wielding power in the social sphere, but a succession of babies prone to illness and, all too frequently, to death. Lady Bridgewater writes frequently and eloquently about pregnancy, labour, child illnesses, and child death, in a collection amounting, as Travitsky argues, to a kind of autobiography of her own most challenging experiences.
Travitsky, Betty, and Elizabeth (Cavendish) Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater. “Subordination and Authorship: Elizabeth Cavendish Egerton”. Subordination and Authorship: the case of Elizabeth Cavendish Egerton and her &quot:loose papers", Tempe, Ariz., pp. 1-172.
161
Perhaps the collection most like this one from the period was written by Mary Carey , who took the opposite side from Lady Bridgewater in the English Civil War, but shared with her the experience of striving for a properly pious response to God's taking away her children. Lady Bridgewater's titles are self-explanatory. A Prayer when I was with Child is a title used for several prayers, one of which thanks God for the blessing of her son and daughter who lived long enough to be christened, and beseeches: when I come to the cruell grones of labour, in this my travaile giue me patience.
Elizabeth (Cavendish) Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater,. Subordination and Authorship in Early Modern England: the case of Elizabeth Cavendish Egerton and her "loose papers". Editor Travitsky, Betty, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
179
A late example is entitled, as if she now needs to be more careful over distinguishing them, A Prayer when I was with Child of Stuart. A Prayer in time of Labour calls that time this height of paine.
Elizabeth (Cavendish) Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater,. Subordination and Authorship in Early Modern England: the case of Elizabeth Cavendish Egerton and her "loose papers". Editor Travitsky, Betty, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
179
A Prayer after I was brought to Bed says thou art ever mercyfull and hast brought us at this time from many and great dangers, and me from the great torture of Childbirth.
Elizabeth (Cavendish) Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater,. Subordination and Authorship in Early Modern England: the case of Elizabeth Cavendish Egerton and her "loose papers". Editor Travitsky, Betty, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
180
Other speaking titles include A Prayer when I continued wth [sic] Child, after I thought I should have fallen in Labour (a tiny narrative), Upon occasion of the death of my Boy Henry (who died at twenty-nine days when his mother was twenty-nine years old: she prays that she may avoid wishing he had never been born),
Elizabeth (Cavendish) Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater,. Subordination and Authorship in Early Modern England: the case of Elizabeth Cavendish Egerton and her "loose papers". Editor Travitsky, Betty, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
198
and When I lost my Deare Girle Kate (who died of smallpox at twenty-two months, a promising child, much loved by her brothers and sister, who would make her mind knowne at any time, & was kind to all, even to Strangers, & had no Anger in her).
Elizabeth (Cavendish) Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater,. Subordination and Authorship in Early Modern England: the case of Elizabeth Cavendish Egerton and her "loose papers". Editor Travitsky, Betty, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
199
Two more poems on Kate follow.

Frances Brooke

Number 128, 12 June 1755, follows Jane Collier 's fairly recent Art of Tormenting in discussing mental cruelty in marriage; it advises husbands to use some caution, since a wife can die of a broken heart; and the misfortune is, that there is no tormenting a dead wife.
The World. R. and J. Dodsley.
128: 780
In no. 130, on 26 June, Priscilla Cross-Stitch, one of three old maids living together, uses the magazine as a medium tactfully to inform their male servant that they dislike his tight nankeen breeches. No. 143 (25 September) quotes Anne Finch 's truly original poem, called the Spleen, which pleases me more than almost any thing I have read.
The World. R. and J. Dodsley.
143: 858
No. 144 (2 October) turns on a sixteen-year-old girl's seduction by a man posing as financial saviour, and captures the differing attitudes of all those concerned. A daughter of the seducer writes, I dare not indulge my pity for her as I would, lest it should lead me to think too hardly of one, whom I am bound in duty to reverence and honour.
The World. R. and J. Dodsley.
144: 865
In no. 145 (9 October), a woman writes about a suitor who remained faithful even when her beauty was ruined by smallpox, but deserted her in a flash when her father lost his fortune.

Elizabeth Burnet

Gilbert Burnet's second marriage, in late May 1687 to Mary Scott , was also a love match (though she was rich). She died of smallpox on 18 June 1698, having borne seven children during her eleven years of marriage, and lost two of them (both sons) to death.
Clarke, T. E. S. et al. A Life of Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury. University Press.
224ff

Margaret Calderwood

MC 's brother, another James Steuart , was educated at school and university and on the Grand Tour. He married Lady Frances Wemyss in 1743, and two years later, because she was ill with smallpox, did not (like more cautious propertied men) leave Edinburgh when Prince Charles, the Young Pretender , had occupied the city and established his court there. The result was that after the second Jacobite Rebellion Sir James was excluded from the Bill of Indemnity (though he insisted that he would never have taken up arms against the Hanoverian line). Standing accused of high treason and having left Britain, he was unable to return with safety. He and his wife and son became exiles abroad. Sir James studied political economy and published a book that became important to David Hume among others: An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, 1770.
Calderwood, Margaret. “To the Reader; Introductory Chapter”. Letters and Journals, edited by Alexander Fergusson, David Douglas, p. vii - lviii.
xlvi-liv
He and his wife became close friends of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , who addressed to them some of the finest of her late letters.

Lady Anne Clifford

LAC , along with her daughter Margaret, was ill with smallpox during her husband's last illness, and they were both unable to visit him. Although she survived the illness, it permanently scarred her face.
Spence, Richard T. Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery. Sutton Publishing.
79

An Collins

Unspecified illnesses coming one after another kept her housebound for years. Passages in her poems suggest that she was disabled in some way and possibly disfigured (by, for instance, smallpox).

Mary Collyer

The story enforces the view that love comes but once in a lifetime (like smallpox, commented the Critical Review). Having lost her only love, the heroine is doomed to remain forever in the cloister.

Edmund Curll

Curll was apprenticed sometime around 1697 to 1699, and set up in business for himself by early 1706.
Baines, Paul, and Pat Rogers. Edmund Curll, Bookseller. Clarendon Press.
12, 22
He became a particularly agile entrepreneur with a nose for new market niches and an absence of moral scruple. He also held auctions of books, sold patent medicines at his shop, and published works on smallpox and venereal disease.
He was known for publishing pornography (often misogynist), inaccurate statements, deliberately false attributions, and material acquired against the wishes of the author. He also published religious works, and respectable authors like the poet Matthew Prior ; but it was probably his perception of the publicity value of female names which led him to publish work by a number of serious women writers, like Jane Barker , Susanna Centlivre , the mysterious, Irish Sarah Butler , and (without authority) the pious Elizabeth Singer Rowe . His recent biographers call him an eccentric outsider in the world of publishing.
Baines, Paul, and Pat Rogers. Edmund Curll, Bookseller. Clarendon Press.
4

Lady Eleanor Douglas

LED marked the death from smallpox of her elder grandson with Sions Lamentation, Lord Henry Hastings , His Funerals Blessing.
This was the young man whose death Dryden lamented with extravagant hyperbole in his earliest published poem.
Douglas, Lady Eleanor. Prophetic Writings of Lady Eleanor Davies. Editor Cope, Esther S., Oxford University Press.
271ff
Cokayne, George Edward. The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, extant, extinct, or dormant. Editor Gibbs, Vicary, St Catherine Press.
6: 659

Queen Elizabeth I

QEI suffered an attack of smallpox which she barely survived. The question of the succession loomed, and Burghley actually wrote a memo instructing the Privy Council , in the event of her death, to appoint the next monarch.
Gaskill, Malcolm. “Dining with Ivan the Terrible”. London Review of Books, Vol.
40
, No. 3, pp. 37-8.
37

Ephelia

After being brought up in the Herbert family, Lady Mary Villiers was given away (not yet in her teens) in a dynastic marriage, celebrated with great pomp on 8 January 1635, to Charles, Lord Herbert (grandson of the Countess of Pembroke , the poet). He was then sent off to complete his education by travelling in Europe, and died of smallpox in January 1636.

Katharine Evans

Soon after the women's imprisonment they were so badly stung by mosquitoes while asleep at night that their faces became as unrecognisably swollen as if they had smallpox.
Evans, Katharine, and Sarah Chevers. This is a Short Relation of some of the Cruel Sufferings. Robert Wilson.
72
Their health suffered severely from other factors, such as heat and hunger-strikes, and each one was several times near death.