Eliza Parsons

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Standard Name: Parsons, Eliza
Birth Name: Eliza Philp
Married Name: Eliza Parsons
Pseudonym: A Descendant
Writing for money in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, EP produced about twenty novels comprising (she said) sixty-five volumes, which may have been reckoned to include her play and six volumes of novels translated from French. All her fiction is didactic, and the works which are not sentimental are gothic. She began as a heavy-handed stylist and never ceased to over-write, but she was skilled in hooking and holding readers. She was popular with the public though she had to be content with faint praise from reviewers, who often commented on her defective grammar.
Title-page of Eliza Parsons's novel "Woman as She Should Be, or Memoirs of Mrs. Menville", 1793, vol. 1 (of 4).

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Mary Robinson
MR remained devoted to the idea of female friendship. She met the artist Maria Cosway in France and they became firm friends. In her last months she wrote to the novelist Elizabeth Gunning to sympathise...
Intertextuality and Influence Jane Austen
Despite some later revision, Northanger Abbey is essentially (like its ancestor Susan) a novel of the 1790s, a spoof of both the gothic and romance modes which were then all the rage. Austen's specific...
Leisure and Society Elizabeth Bonhote
In 1790 she subscribed to someone else's novel: Miss Meredith by Eliza Parsons .
Leisure and Society Henrietta Maria Bowdler
As a young woman HMB was capable of attending the opera and whenever there was dancing on stage keeping her eyes shut the whole time, [since] it was so indelicate she could not bear to...
Leisure and Society Mary Lady Champion de Crespigny
Her patronage of authors shows up in subscriptions and dedications. She subscribed to works by Mary Deverell , Isabella Kelly , Eliza Parsons , Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson , and no doubt many more. Many of...
Leisure and Society Mariana Starke
MS and her family were great supporters of literature through the subscription system. She subscribed in 1781 to Anne Francis 's Poetical Translation of the Song of Solomon, from the original Hebrew, which was...
Leisure and Society Anna Margaretta Larpent
As her diary records, she had eclectic interests and found plenty of material to satisfy them. Her wide reading consisted chiefly but not exclusively of plays. She wrote down critical comments on almost everything she...
Occupation Anne Damer
AD was also a scholar (Horace Walpole said she wrote Latin like Pliny ) and a book-collector. She patronised writing by women, by subscribing (for instance) to Miscellanies in Prose and Verse by Catherine Jemmat
Publishing Jane Porter
The publisher, Longman , had advertised this work as in the press in a flyer printed in April 1814 (bound into a copy of Modern Times by Eliza Parsons , 1814). Within a couple of...
Publishing Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
For printing ConstanceHookham used the Logographic Press (an experimental firm which aimed to speed printing by having certain common words precast as units of type instead of having to be assembled from individual letters)...
Textual Features Anna Maria Mackenzie
AMM 's opening address To the Readers of Modern Romance says that ancient romance was put paid to by the new source of amusement . . . struck out by Henry Fielding and Richardson (to...
Textual Production Georgiana Cavendish Duchess of Devonshire
An edition of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire 's poem The Passage of Mount St. Gothard, published at Glasgow as no. 8 of the Stewart and Meikle Tracts, is its earliest-dated but surely not...
Textual Production Catherine Gore
The title of CG 's anonymous novel Women as They Are; or, The Manners of the Day, linked it to a reformist tradition running from Robert Bage in 1792, through Barbara Hofland in 1815...
Textual Production Elizabeth Meeke
Various works have been wrongly attributed to Mrs Meeke during her lifetime and afterwards, perhaps because of her remarkable productivity. The old Dictionary of National Biography mistakenly ascribed to her Murray House. A Plain Unvarnished...

Timeline

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Texts

Parsons, Eliza. An Old Friend with a New Face. T. N. Longman, 1797, 3 vols.
Parsons, Eliza. Anecdotes of Two Well-Known Families. T. N. Longman, 1798, 3 vols.
Parsons, Eliza. Ellen and Julia. William Lane, 1793, 2 vols.
Varma, Devendra P., and Eliza Parsons. “Introduction”. Castle of Wolfenbach, Folio Press, 1968, p. xiii - xxiv.
Varma, Devendra P., and Eliza Parsons. “Introduction”. The Mysterious Warning, Folio Press, 1968, p. vii - xvi.
Hoeveler, Diane Long, and Eliza Parsons. “Introduction”. The Castle of Wolfenbach, edited by Diane Long Hoeveler and Diane Long Hoeveler, Valancourt Books, 2007, p. vii - xvii.
Parsons, Eliza, and William Windham. Letter to William Windham, 14 May [1794]. http://BL Add M3 37914.
Parsons, Eliza. Lucy. William Lane, 1794, 3 vols.
Parsons, Eliza. Murray House. P. Norbury, 1804, 3 vols.
Parsons, Eliza. The Castle of Wolfenbach. William Lane, 1793, 2 vols.
Parsons, Eliza. The Castle of Wolfenbach. Editor Hoeveler, Diane Long, Valancourt Books, 2007.
Parsons, Eliza. The Convict. P. Norbury, 1807, 4 vols.
Parsons, Eliza. The Errors of Education. William Lane, 1791, 3 vols.
Parsons, Eliza. The Girl of the Mountains. William Lane, 1797, 4 vols.
Parsons, Eliza. The History of Miss Meredith. Hookham, 1790, 2 vols.
Parsons, Eliza. The Intrigues of a Morning. William Lane, 1792.
Parsons, Eliza. The Miser and His Family. P. Norbury, 1800, 4 vols.
Parsons, Eliza. The Mysterious Visit. P. Norbury, 1802, http://4 vols.
Parsons, Eliza. The Mysterious Warning. William Lane, 1796, 4 vols.
Parsons, Eliza. The Peasant of Ardenne Forest. P. Norbury, 1801, 4 vols.
Parsons, Eliza. The Valley of St. Gothard. P. Norbury, 1799, 3 vols.
Parsons, Eliza. The Voluntary Exile. William Lane, 1795, 5 vols.
Parsons, Eliza. Woman As She Should Be. William Lane, 1793, 4 vols.
Parsons, Eliza. Women As They Are. William Lane, 1796, 4 vols.