Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins

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Standard Name: Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda
Birth Name: Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
Pseudonym: L
Pseudonym: L. M. H.
As a novelist (beginning anonymously in the late eighteenth century with a string of novels only recently identified as hers, and still publishing—under her name—forty years later), LMH is always didactic. But while some of her early works treat improbable, often exotic adventures (including clumsy and sensationalized but interesting and unusual treatment of matters involving the female body) her later fiction often sounds as if her goal is opinion-forming rather than story-telling: as if essays (like the sermonets she published with her brother) might have been her natural talent. She also produced translation, travel writing, and a devotional compilation, and as a memoirist she gives full rein to her highly individualised views.
Title-page of Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins, "Memoirs, Anecdotes, Facts, and Opinions", 1824 (her second book of memoirs), vol. 1.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Menella Bute Smedley
MBS was a god-daughter of Henry Hawkins (brother of the novelist and woman of letters Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins ). Her mother corresponded with Laetitia-Matilda.
Smedley, Edward. Poems by the late Edward Smedley. Baldwin and Cradock, 1837.
vii, 288, 376
Family and Intimate relationships Naomi Jacob
She describes her mother as in advance of her times in many ways: a bicycle rider, a Poor Law Guardian,
Jacob, Naomi. Me: A Chronicle about Other People. Hutchinson, 1933.
38
witty, charming, deeply religious, but with no money and no idea how to...
Family and Intimate relationships Charlotte Lennox
This alleged involvement in violence has been generally attributed both by CL 's contemporaries (like Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins , who said she had given a servant ill words and hard blows)
qtd. in
Small, Miriam Rossiter. Charlotte Ramsay Lennox, An Eighteenth Century Lady of Letters. Archon Books, 1969.
47
and by later...
Fictionalization Frances Burney
Bibliographer James Raven notes a crescendo in novelistic echoes of FB 's works during the 1780s. Burney's brother Charles , for instance, noted borrowings from both Evelina and Cecilia in his review for the Monthly...
Leisure and Society Charlotte Lennox
Possibly her abrasive character, or some refusal to keep up appearances, or some details of her life which time has veiled, seemed to these women impolite. Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins criticised CL 's housekeeping, and circulated a...
Literary responses Adelaide O'Keeffe
The date makes it very probably this book which was praised by Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins in her preface to The Countess and Gertrude, which she published later the same year.
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. The Countess and Gertrude. F. C. and J. Rivington, 1811, 4 vols.
1: xxvi
Literary responses Helen Maria Williams
These volumes moved James Boswell , in a revised edition of his life of Johnson, to withdraw his earlier description of HMW as amiable and to assert that Johnson would have found her current attitudes...
Literary responses Mary Robinson
On her deathbed MR regretted that most of her works had been composed in too much haste,
Robinson, Mary. Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson. Editor Levy, Moses Joseph, Peter Owen, 1994.
151
and declared that if, against all expectation, she should survive, she would begin a new long work...
Literary responses Hester Lynch Piozzi
The very young Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins came unexpectedly on the letter of rebuke to Johnson while helping her father with his biographical work: she admired the letter enough to record her admiration years later, though she...
Occupation Charlotte Lennox
Mary Welch later married the sculptor Joseph Nollekens ;
Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins suggested that Mary Nollekens was the original of Johnson 's Pekuah,
Carlile, Susan. Charlotte Lennox. An Independent Mind. University of Toronto Press, 2018.
202
but the dates make this highly unlikely.
her sister became an intellectual...
Author summary Eliza Kirkham Mathews
EKM published less than has been supposed. Only her children's books, two volumes of poems, and two novels (melodramatic but heartfelt, presenting actual, financial, as well as romance-type struggles) pose no problems of attribution. She...
Textual Features Mary Russell Mitford
MRM has no patience with Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins 's The Countess and Gertrude or with Byron 's Childe Harold.
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, 1870, 2 vols.
1: 133, 152
She despises Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis as a delightful mixture of cant and affectation...
Textual Production Eliza Kirkham Mathews
A series of novels—beginning with Constance, 1785 (published as by a young lady when the future EKM was about thirteen), and continuing, with each title linked backwards to others in the series, to The...
Textual Production Eliza Kirkham Mathews
The heroine of Adelaide, who is nine at the beginning of the story, suffers serious illness and wishes to die, since she was assured the grave is the safest asylum for the unfortunate.
Mathews, Eliza Kirkham. Adelaide. I. Cooke, 1813.
35
Textual Production Catherine Fanshawe
The letters that CF sent to Anne Grant are not extant, but Grant's side of the correspondence leaves no doubt that the two were in constant dialogue about new books they had read, and their...

Timeline

1793: Publishers Hookham and Carpenter opened a...

Writing climate item

1793

Publishers Hookham and Carpenter opened a refitted version of the thirty-year-old Hookham's Library or Literary Assembly in Old Bond Street, promising the best people, the best books.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press, 1999.
6

Texts

Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. Anecdotes, Biographical Sketches, and Memoirs. F. C. and J. Rivington, 1822.
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. Annaline. J. Carpenter, 1824, 3 vols.
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. Argus. T. Hookham, 1789, 3 vols.
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. Arnold Zulig. T. Hookham, 1790.
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. Constance. Thomas Hookham, 1785, 4 vols.
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. Devotional Exercises Extracted from Bishop Patrick’s Christian Sacrifice. 1823.
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. Heraline. F. C. and J. Rivington, 1821, 4 vols.
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. Letters on the Female Mind. Hookham and Carpenter, 1793, 2 vols.
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. Memoirs of a Scots Heiress. T. Hookham, 1791, 3 vols.
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. Memoirs, Anecdotes, Facts and Opinions. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, and C. and J. Rivington, 1824, 2 vols.
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. Rosanne. F. C. and J. Rivington, 1814, 3 vols.
Hawkins, Henry, and Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins. Sermonets. F. C. and J. Rivington, 1814.
Miller, Johann Martin. Siegwart. Translator Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda, J. Carpenter, 1806, 3 vols.
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. The Count de Hoensdern. T. Hookham, 1792, 3 vols.
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. The Countess and Gertrude. F. C. and J. Rivington, 1811, 4 vols.
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. The Pharos. T. Hookham, 1786, 2 vols.