Lady Isabella King

Margaret Holford the younger dedicated her next volume of verse, The Past, to Lady Isabella King , who had opened her home for single ladies in Bailbrook House near Bath three years before.

From an early age Elizabeth supplemented whatever teaching she could gain by eager study for herself. She seems to have regarded reading and writing as intensely private pursuits: she told Lady Isabella King that she...

Holford seems to have cared about making influential friends, and succeeded in doing so although she lived in the provinces. She established a correspondence with Sir Walter Scott , and although their relationship got off...

Elizabeth Smith also made a warm friend of Lady Isabella King (who later founded Bailbrook House near Bath as a refuge for gentlewomen without funds). Indeed, though Smith died years before Lady Isabella...

Nevertheless the idea of the women's utopia became associated in the public mind with never marrying at all. Anna Letitia Barbauld signed a comic defence of old maids as written from Milenium [sic] Hall...

Among a large cast, Mrs Charlton (who has a protegee, the daughter of her early love, who is intensely but secretly unhappy) and Mrs Finch are old maids and glad to be so. Althea (youngest...

She made visits to London from time to time, staying with her sister Mrs Walker in Portland Place and later in Pall Mall, and after 1820 at the Walkers' country home, Hendon Place at...