Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
-
Standard Name: Hertford, Frances Seymour,,, Countess of
Birth Name: Frances Thynne
Married Name: Frances Seymour
Titled: Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
Titled: Frances Seymour, Duchess of Somerset
Nickname: Fanny
Pseudonym: Eusebia
Nickname: Renée
Used Form: Renee
Living an upper-class life in the eighteenth century, Lady Hertford
did not publish; her patronage activity was as important as her writing. But as well as letters, a fragmentary political journal, and commonplace-books, she wrote poems, some of which, circulating in manuscript, drifted into print in her lifetime, while a few achieved some notoriety. She claimed that she wrote for her own pleasure and found it easy to suppress any stirrings of ambition.
Kennedy, Deborah. Poetic Sisters. Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. Bucknell University Press.
All the mock eclogues (written, like most of Montagu's more ambitious poetry, in heroic couplets with the occasional triplet) target actual individuals and refer to events which were gossip of the day. Monday, Wednesday...
Friends, Associates
Jean Marishall
While in LondonJM
was in touch with a long list of patrons or prospective patrons, including those eminent in both the social and literary worlds. The socially prominent included (as well as a colonel...
Publishing
Judith Cowper Madan
Pattison died of smallpox in July this year, aged about twenty-one.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
The full title was Memoirs for the History of Madame de Maintenon and of the last age; Lennox published it as the author of The Female Quixote. The price was fifteen shillings; the...
Publishing
Mary Leapor
The arrangements for publication had not been entirely smooth sailing. ML
was insulted when Freemantle predicted that the book might make her £10.
Rizzo, Betty. “Molly Leapor: An Anxiety for Influence”. The Age of Johnson, edited by Paul J. Korshin, Vol.
4
, pp. 313-43.
322
Freemantle was nevertheless instrumental in persuading her to publish and in...
Publishing
Mary Jones
This volume was dedicated to the Princess of Orange
: Anne, daughter of George II
and the late Queen Caroline
. The princess's mother had been a patron of MJ
's friend Martha Lovelace, later...
Friends, Associates
Jane Johnson
Woolsey Johnson was succeeded in his living at Olney by the Evangelically-inclined minor poet Moses Browne
(a protégé of Lady Hertford
). Both Johnsons differed doctrinally from Browne, and were soon at open enmity with...
Literary responses
Eliza Haywood
The Monthly Review found the heroine of this book more interesting than Betsy Thoughtless (with better character-drawing but a continued deficiency in plot and sentiments. It conceded that the whole was doubtless much superior to...
Education
Elizabeth Grant
EG
refers to a number of texts that influenced her as a child. She learned to read by the age of three, taught by loving aunts, and remembered in particular Puss in Boots, Bluebeard...
Leisure and Society
Anne Finch
AF
was painted in a miniature by Peter Cross
(now in the National Portrait Gallery
) round about 1690. She left another, later miniature of her by Zincke
in her will to Lady Hertford
...
Friends, Associates
Anne Finch
AF
enjoyed personal friendships with a number of distinguished men, among them Bishop Thomas Ken
. She valued female friendship very highly; women friends figure prominently in her poetry. Lady Catherine Jones
, to whom...
Textual Features
Anne Finch
Many of the poems in this volume are political (Jacobite) or religious in feeling. To the Right Honourable Frances Countess of Hartford is a playful warning to a very young patron to not degrade support...
