Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Hester Lynch Piozzi
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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.
In addition to the whimsy which fairies regularly elicited from AB
, this volume combines comedy and horror in the dinner menu of an ogre in The Enchanted Fiddle, which runs from Ploughboy Soup...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
Historical personages, from the Prince of Wales
and his mistress Lady Jersey
downwards, do appear in this book. It ends on the death of Charles James Fox
, apostrophised as one of the great and...
Literary responses
Frances Burney
Hester Thrale
recorded a significant dissenting voice: nine months after publication, Mrs Montagu
cannot bear Evelina.
Clifford, James L. Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs Thrale). Clarendon Press, 1987.
172
The stumbling-block was probably the low elements of the book.
Literary responses
Harriet Lee
Hester Piozzi
particularly admired the last ten lines of the prologue, which apply the imagery of bubbles and rainbows to comedy and tragedy.
Piozzi, Hester Lynch. The Piozzi Letters. Editors Bloom, Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom, University of Delaware Press; Associated University Presses, 1989–2002, 6 vols.
2: 333 and n19
She felt the epilogue, though playful and pretty...
Literary responses
Joanna Baillie
The Critical Review assumed the author was male. It thought the versification monotonous but warmly praised both preface and plays.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
24 (1798): 1-22
Initial reaction from individuals (mostly favourable) concentrated on the puzzle of authorship...
Literary responses
Hannah More
Percy was a great hit, with twenty-one performances, and 4,000 copies sold by March 1777. HM
made £600 from it in the theatre, and £150 from Cadell
for the copyright. She thought, however, the public...
Literary responses
Anna Letitia Barbauld
The Critical Review gave high praise to each of the series. So did the Monthly, which also cracked her anonymity from the beginning.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
46 (1778): 160; 47 (1779): 320
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
191-2
Vulnerable as a Dissenter,...
Literary responses
Sophia Lee
Audiences liked the play, and the theatre's takings were good. But it was performed only four times, with one more showing at the end of the season after SL
had complained to the management. This...
Literary responses
Helen Maria Williams
Hester Piozzi
thought the farewell poem mighty pretty.
qtd. in
Kennedy, Deborah. Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution. Bucknell University Press, 2002.
77
Literary responses
Anne Hunter
The Death Song and Queen Mary's Lamentation proved popular; both had long lives in many guises. Only The Genie was perhaps too politically charged to catch on. Hester Thrale
commented on both the words and...
Literary responses
Georgiana Cavendish Duchess of Devonshire
This novel soon went through four editions, but readers included the disapproving as well as the fascinated. Hester Thrale
roundly pronounced it obscene; the Gentleman's Magazine agreed, though less outspokenly.
Foreman, Amanda. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. HarperCollins, 1998.
61
Both the Critical and...
Literary responses
Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
Hester Lynch Piozzi
evidently felt later that these stories were very strong meat for children. She commented in a letter, I think a great Change has been made in Taste of popular Literature—or rather popular...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Montagu
The patriotism of EM
's riposte ensured its enthusiastic reception. Readers (among them a brother of Elizabeth Carter
, who refrained from enlightening him) assumed that the anonymity of this authoritative critical voice concealed a...
Literary responses
Harriet Lee
The Critical Review (which thought the first volume of Canterbury Tales resembled the work of Marmontel
, but happily without his profligate principles) was enthusiastic: We expect the second volume with impatience, as we have...
Material Conditions of Writing
Frances Burney
She chose her imaginary confidante's name, she wrote, to signify she had Nobody to whom she could confide everything without reserve. Later this confidential teenage diary gave way to a more social type, generally taking...
