Hannah Cowley

-
Standard Name: Cowley, Hannah
Birth Name: Hannah Parkhouse
Married Name: Hannah Cowley
Pseudonym: Anna Matilda
Used Form: Mrs Cowley
Used Form: Mrs Cowley, the Author of the Runaway, A Comedy
HC , who is said to have become a dramatist by accident and who probably persevered out of necessity, achieved in time great stage success during the late eighteenth century. She was well acquainted with the plays of her female predecessors, and often made use of them. She also wrote poetry, and may possibly have written a novel.
Print of the young Hannah Cowley. She sits on a chair in front of a heavy curtain pulled back. Her body is turned to her right, while she looks to the left in semi-profile. She holds a book on her lap, and wears a gown with short sleeves and low neckline, and long gloves. Her hair is styled in a mass of curls on her head and falling down her back.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anna Margaretta Larpent
This diary, covering thirteen years of her later teens and her twenties, provides an annual list of people she spent her time with, public places she visited, and private entertainments she enjoyed. Its criticism, mostly...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Susanna Haswell Rowson
In this humorous poem the author draws on her first-hand knowledge, as an actor and singer, with the London stage. She marshals thirty-four of it actors and writers to appear before Apollo, who metes out...
Textual Production Leah Sumbel
It is often said (for instance by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) that Topham's main aim in this venture was to boost her career. The World was known for featuring personal attacks on...
Textual Production Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Baroness Lytton
The next work by Rosina Bulwer Lytton (later Baroness Lytton) was a novel or fictional biography: The School for Husbands; or, Molière 's Life and Times.
The title is multiply allusive. Molière's comedy L'école...
Textual Production Anna Jane Vardill
For her first few years of appearing there, AJV was almost the only woman in the longish list of poetry contributors to the European Magazine (although over the magazine's lifetime the eleven women who published...
Textual Production Jean Marishall
Years later JM published her vivid account of her struggles to get this novel published. She began writing because she thought (like Hannah Cowley a few years later) that she could do better than what...
Textual Production Mary Russell Mitford
MRM wrote her first attempt, Fiesco, in early 1821, inspired (like Hannah Cowley ) by seeing a mediocre tragedy which she felt she could outdo.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
1: 354, 356
Rejected by Macready , it survives...
Textual Production Hannah More
HM probably gave up the theatre (both writing for it and attending plays) less because of the loss of David Garrick or the conflict with Hannah Cowley than because of her religious belief, which presented...
Textual Features Anne Thackeray Ritchie
The title of the Blackstick Papers alludes to the character of the Fairy Blackstick from her father 's Rose and the Ring: she places her essays under the kindly tutelage
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Blackstick Papers. Books for Libraries Press.
3-4
of this spirit...
Textual Features Elizabeth Inchbald
EI did not choose the plays herself. Shakespeare fills the first five volumes, apart from one piece by Ben Jonson , and five of her own plays fill volume 20. The eighteenth century is better...
Textual Features Mary Robinson
The poems include an Ode to Genius (which implicitly claims that status), Petrarch to Laura (which woos a woman in a male voice), and a piece responding to Hannah Cowley 's expression of disbelief that...
Textual Features Charlotte Smith
In this book the ancient and imposing but crumbling manor house is an emblem of English society as a whole: a trope which was to be popular with later novelists. The downtrodden orphan heroine, Monimia...
Textual Features Leah Sumbel
Another of its features was the exchange of Della Cruscan verse between Robert Merry and Hannah Cowley , and because of Merry's friendship with Hester Lynch Piozzi , Piozzi's movements were advertised in The World.
Jenkins, Annibel. “<span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘j’>The World</span> and All the People in It: London, 1787-1789”. Boundaries, Margins and Frames: Ways of Seeing and Knowing the Eighteenth Century: Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SEASECS) Conference, Chapel Hill, NC.
Textual Features Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan
In the society that Morgan depicts, the Irish Catholic gentry are mostly absent, scattered in European exile. The peasantry, dirt-poor but generous-hearted, include Tim O'Leary, schoolmaster of a hedge school, scholar and expert in Irish...
Reception Hannah More
Hannah Cowley (still fairly fresh from her initial stage success, and currently waiting for her long-delayed tragedy, Albina, to be staged) suspected More of plagiarising from her, or the theatre managers who held her...

Timeline

April 1789: The Gentleman's Magazine published Anna Seward's...

Women writers item

April 1789

The Gentleman's Magazine published Anna Seward 's selection of living celebrated Female Poets.

1791: William Gifford, in his satire The Baviad,...

Writing climate item

1791

William Gifford , in his satire The Baviad, became the first to attack the Della Cruscan body of poetry which notably included work by Robert Merry and Hannah Cowley .

11 October 1819: The Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, owned...

Building item

11 October 1819

The Theatre Royal , Bury St Edmunds, owned by its architect, William Wilkins , opened as a state-of-the-art modern theatre.

1994: Juggernaut was set up as a small New York...

Women writers item

1994

Juggernaut was set up as a small New York theatre company; in 2001 it decided to publicise the work of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women playwrights.

Texts

Cowley, Hannah. A Bold Stroke for a Husband. T. Evans.
Cowley, Hannah. A Day in Turkey. G. G. J. and J. Robinson.
Cowley, Hannah. A School for Greybeards. G. G. J. and J. Robinson.
Cowley, Hannah. Albina, Countess Raimond. J. Dodsley.
Cowley, Hannah, and William Hutchinson. “Edwina. A Poem”. The History of the County of Cumberland, Vol.
2
, F. Jollie, 1794, pp. 5-15.
Link, Frederick M., and Hannah Cowley. “Introduction”. The Plays of Hannah Cowley, Vol.
1
, Garland, 1979, p. v - xlxx.
Cowley, Hannah. More Ways Than One. T. Evans.
Cowley, Hannah. The Belle’s Stratagem. T. Cadell.
Cowley, Hannah. The Fate of Sparta. G. G. J. and J. Robinson.
Cowley, Hannah. The Italian Marauders. Printed by J. Dean for George Hughes, 1810.
Cowley, Hannah. The Maid of Arragon; A Tale. L. Davis.
Cowley, Hannah. The Plays of Hannah Cowley. Editor Link, Frederick M., Garland, 1979.
Cowley, Hannah. The Poetry of Anna Matilda. John Bell, 1788.
Cowley, Hannah. The Runaway. Printed for the author.
Cowley, Hannah. The Scottish Village. G. G. J. and J. Robinson.
Cowley, Hannah. The Siege of Acre. J. Debrett, 1801.
Cowley, Hannah. The Town Before You. T. N. Longman.
Cowley, Hannah. The Works of Mrs. Cowley: Dramas and Poems. Wilkie and Robinson, 1813.
Cowley, Hannah. Which Is the Man?. C. Dilly, 1782.
Cowley, Hannah. Who’s the Dupe?. J. Dodsley.