Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Hester Lynch Piozzi
-
Standard Name: Piozzi, Hester Lynch
Birth Name: Hester Lynch Salusbury
Married Name: Hester Lynch Thrale
Married Name: Hester Lynch Piozzi
Pseudonym: H: L: T.
Pseudonym: An Old Acquaintance of the Public
Pseudonym: An Old Woman
Self-constructed Name: H: L: P.
Used Form: Hester Thrale
Hester Lynch Thrale, later Hester Lynch Piozzi
, was by inclination and practice a woman of letters as well as a woman of the world. She loved recording facts and details; she was an incisive critic (of real learning) and a great entertainer. She wrote poems, translations, essays, letters, journals, memoirs, and works of scholarship, and she published both during the later eighteenth and during the earlier nineteenth century.
Those present included Hester Lynch Piozzi
, Hannah More
and her sisters, Sarah Siddons
, and others. The great point at issue was the gender of the anonymous author.
Hester Piozzi
referred all this as common knowledge when she met EH
. Hervey remained a friend of Merry
after his marriage and perhaps shared his acquaintance with the Irish patriot Lord Edward Fitzgerald
...
Friends, Associates
Margaret Bingham Countess Lucan
She was a well-known figure in London cultural circles, particularly that of the Bluestockings. Charles Burney
called her at-home evenings blue conversazioni's and Horace Walpole
called them quite Mazarine-blue. Others specifically mentioned in...
Frances Burney
preferred HMB
, as more kind and gentle, to her sister Frances Bowdler. Burney amusingly records a visit by herself, HMB and others, to Lady Miller
of Batheaston on 8 June 1780, when...
Friends, Associates
Anna Williams
Williams enjoyed cordial relations with other members of Johnson's circle, like Elizabeth Carter
(who helped with subscriptions for Williams's book when Johnson was dragging his feet) and Hester Thrale
(who contributed). Carter counted her a...
Friends, Associates
Frances Reynolds
Hester Thrale
was an exception to the consensus of opinion (shared by Johnson) that FR
was indecisive: she wrote admiringly of FR's presence of mind in saving a dinner party threatened by the bad behaviour...
Friends, Associates
Henrietta Maria Bowdler
One of HMB
's male friends was James Plumptre
, younger brother of the writers Anne
and Annabella
(though the sisters' radical politics were diametrically opposed to those of the Bowdler family). By 1802 she...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Montagu
EM
met and became friends with Hester Thrale (later Piozzi
).
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon, 1990.
255-7
Friends, Associates
Mary Delany
MD
continued to make new friends late in life (though she was said to have declined to meet Hester Thrale
).
Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press, 1952.
60
The king
and queen
were remarkably attentive to her in her widowhood. Prominent...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Montagu
EM
met Frances Burney
at Hester Thrale
's house, Streatham Park, near London.
Hemlow, Joyce. The History of Fanny Burney. Clarendon, 1958.
106-7
Friends, Associates
Ann Radcliffe
While staying with her uncle Thomas Bentley at Chelsea, Ann Ward (later AR
) met a number of influential men, most of them with Dissenting connections: Joseph Banks
, George Fordyce
, Ralph Griffiths
,...
Friends, Associates
Samuel Johnson
Boswell's is Johnson's most famous friendship, but his women friends were immensely important to him. Carter and Lennox were joined by Hester Thrale
(though Johnson always reckoned her husband, Henry Thrale
, if anything the...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Montagu
The leading figures in the movement were Montagu herself (who spent freely in hospitality, and who was later dubbed the Queen of the Bluestockings or Queen of the Blues) and Carter
(the most intellectually...
