Henrietta Knight, Lady Luxborough

EC was courted by John Dalton , the tutor and preacher who was suspected of having had an affair with Lady Luxborough .

Lady Hertford wrote that a certain distrust of her own judgement made her slow in the choice of a friend; but when that choice is made, my attachments are too strong to be easily broken...

Among writers who received Lady Hertford's patronage were Elizabeth Singer Rowe , Elizabeth Boyd , Elizabeth Carter , Mary Chandler , Isaac Watts , Laurence Eusden (for whom she set topics of occasional poems), James Thomson

Hertford later included poems of her own composition in her letters to Rowe and to Lord Winchilsea , widower of the poet Anne Finch . She exchanged verse, too, with Frederick, Prince of Wales ...

Though most of her anthologized writers are men, LA includes Hannah More , Anna Letitia Barbauld , and Lady Luxborough . Perhaps recalling her own childhood activism, she included anti-slavery poems.

Frances Thynne, later Hertford, began letter-writing at an early age. She was eleven when her grandfather was glad to find her in an hopeful way of being a good scribe, and twelve when her...