Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Elizabeth Hamilton
-
Standard Name: Hamilton, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Hamilton
Nickname: Eliza Hamilton
In her own day EH
was best known and loved for My Ain Fireside (a song expressive of national Scottish feeling and the glorification of the domestic) and for Cottagers of Glenburnie, 1808, a novel of domestic improvement. In later generations her satire on the Jacobins has got her type-cast as an unmitigated conservative. In fact her writings in many genres (poems, novels, essays, biography, and writings on education, religion, and philosophy) combine a scholarly and an ironic bent, and her conservatism includes a strong streak of feminism. Her novels make less use than most of the marriage plot, and she presents single women as strong and admirable.
Her model for this genre was Elizabeth Hamilton
, but the influence of Catharine Macaulay
is discerned by Karen O'Brien
in Aikin's Whig positioning and in her self-confidently judgemental tone.
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
218
This work was reissued...
Intertextuality and Influence
Eliza Haywood
A more recent generation of feminist scholars has succeeded in locating EH
in the developing tradition of women's fiction. Critic Mary Anne Schofield
has argued that her heroines are feisty feminists. Paula Backscheider
points out...
Literary responses
Maria Edgeworth
The Critical Review notice on Leonora began with oblique reference to Elizabeth Hamilton
's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
3d ser. 7 (1806): 215
It judged that the whole novel is written with great spirit...
Literary responses
Sydney Owenson Lady Morgan
Professionally, Morgan was a notable success. She was a canny businesswoman, never afraid to assert herself against an established publisher or seek out a new one. This paid off in a remarkable level of earnings...
Literary responses
Mary Hays
This time most reviews were respectful: the Analytical of course, the Monthly (in which William Taylor
noted that the novel was a cut above the common run, with serious and unusual moral teaching to impart)...
Literary responses
Jane Austen
Some Austen news items are regrettable. In an interview with the Royal Geographical Society
in June 2011, V.S. Naipaul
, in asserting his own superiority to women writers (and claiming he could tell male from...
Literary responses
Helen Maria Williams
It talked of the need to counter her poisonous false philosophy with antidotes from the writings of a More
, a Hamilton
, and a West
.
Michael-Johnston, Georgina. Helen Maria Williams: Liberty, Sensibility, and Education. University of Alberta, 1998.
140
Occupation
Catherine Hutton
As well as collecting illustrations of costume, CH
was an early collector of autographs. (She began both these collections at a young age, but presumably had to start again from scratch after her losses in...
From early in her publishing career ME
sent out into the world short pieces as well as longer ones and collections of her own. In this way she placed stories in miscellaneous volumes (The...
Hutton, Catherine. Reminiscences of a Gentlewoman of the Last Century. Editor Beale, Catherine Hutton, Cornish Brothers, 1891.
159
Reception
Maria Edgeworth
Scholarly and critical work on her ever since Marilyn Butler
's literary biography, 1972, has amassed a significant body of new understanding. In 2009 Susan Egenolf
discussed her work in political fiction along with some...
Textual Features
Lady Louisa Stuart
LLS
's letters to Scott
show her to have been a trusted and perceptive critic of his novels, which she often read before publication. On The Heart of Mid-Lothian she sent him a major critique...
Textual Features
May Laffan
In this novel ML
returns to the controversy of Irish Home Rule so thoroughly treated in Hogan, M.P., putting criticisms of it into the mouths of middle-class, Protestant Irish residents. The attorney Mr Perry...
Textual Features
Lady Eleanor Butler
Particularly worthy of mention is a jaunty, witty, perceptive Hymn to Diana, which addresses the goddess of chastity in the manner of a litany, with a string of petitions. Since Diana has decreed, says...
