Sophia Lee

HL , Romantic-period novelist and dramatist, is remembered primarily for the fiction collection Canterbury Tales, in which her sister Sophia shared.

Though she also wrote poetry and other genres, AMP 's name rests on her almost thirty historical romances (totalling 54 volumes). Many had US editions and French translations. She tends to focus on male rather...

She received rave reviews for this first appearance, as Mrs Cadwallader in The Author (a burlesque portrayal of a woman writer). Later that summer she swashbuckled as Macheath in a famous transvestite production of Gay

A few years later she believed, as if she had entered into one of her own fantasies for children, that she had found out the Shakespeare cipher, which comes out as definitely as the result...

Byron praised the Canterbury Tales, but in 1913George Saintsbury asserted that Byron had done so either irresponsibly or impishly. They were, he said, not exactly bad, but also as far as possible from...

Her historical romance The Pilgrims of Walsingham, 1835, is written on the Canterbury Tales model (as practised originally by Chaucer and more recently by Harriet Lee and her sister ). AS 's pilgrims who...

In a prologue MD jokes about her own daring to judge Queen Elizabeth. Her language is formal and stilted, but she has a strong dramatic grasp of the complex and shifting feelings of Mary and...

After her deliberately egotistical preface AY erases herself to present her novel as a manuscript written by her male protagonist, Henry, imprisoned in a castle on an island; his tale begins during the night of...

In its narration of this particular variant on historical fact (a fictional daughter born to Mary and Bothwell), the novel recalls Sophia Lee 's The Recess.

This novel, a third-person narrative, opens arrestingly—It was a cold, and dreary evening, in the month of October 1548—on the French Count d'Almaile's discovery of a female skeleton in her coffin...

BH followed here the recipe popularised by Sophia Lee in The Recess: interweaving the imaginary history of a young person . . . with the important and interesting detail of historic facts, which are...

Both in an Address to the Editor and in a series of explanatory footnotes, AO positions herself on the one hand as a historian with a proper regard for available evidence, and on the other...

In the later stages of the novel, Anthony is in love with Lady Maria, an unrecorded daughter of Mary, Queen of Scots (a plot twist which must ultimately be owed to Sophia Lee and The...

It is often said that AR attended the school run by Sophia and Harriet Lee and their sisters (of whom she was later a friend or acquaintance) in Bath. But no evidence supports the...

The flight of Mary, Queen of Scots from her own country in May 1568 into Elizabeth's domain caused the English queen much heart-burning. Mary (Elizabeth's cousin) was an obvious pretender to the throne, representing the...