Mary Lady Champion de Crespigny

MLCC used her exalted social position as a patron of writers, especially women writers. She was a habitual diarist (though little of her diary survives) and a writer of occasional poetry—for manuscript circulation, or inscription on landscape features, and at least once for print. She chose print for two longer works: a novel and a conduct-book, 1803, made up of letters addressed to her teenage son in about 1780.