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.
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...
A TLS review by R. W. Chapman
sounded distinctly anti-feminist. He wrote that by employing heroic remedies, the indomitable editor has cut away all the elaborate openings and studied conclusions, masses of domestic detail, nine-tenths...
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...
Reception
Hannah More
Not all responses were positive: according to Hester Lynch Thrale
, this work of HM
's caused boys at the elite Westminster School
to burn her in effigy.
Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press.
113
Publishing
Hannah More
By 23 July 1794, following the appearance of Paine's The Age of Reason, Porteus was urging More to write on the evidences of Christianity in the style of her Village Politics. She declined...
Textual Production
Hannah More
Mary Ann Burges
's anonymous The Progress of Pilgrim Good-Intent, in Jacobinical Times was widely supposed (for instance by Hester Piozzi
and Lady Eleanor Butler
) to be by Hannah More
.
Piozzi, Hester Lynch. The Piozzi Letters. Editors Bloom, Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom, University of Delaware Press; Associated University Presses.
3: 186-7 and n
Friends, Associates
Hannah More
Here she began to gather the circle of friends which by the end of her long life had touched every cranny of English society. She had already met Edmund Burke
in Bristol the previous September...
Friends, Associates
Hannah More
Her later friendships often blended the personal with the political, like those with Beilby Porteus
(Bishop of London from 1787, where she met him) and the abolitionists William Wilberforce
(met at Bath the same year)...
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...
Textual Production
Jan Morris
More than a decade later, in 1978, JM
followed her own portrait of Oxford by editing The Oxford Book of Oxford, a quirky anthology of often very short anecdotes and other excerpts, aimed less...
Textual Production
Jean Plaidy
The first-named is George I
's rejected queen
(accused of adultery and imprisoned for life before her husband came to the English throne, while her alleged lover
was assassinated). The protagonist of the second novel...
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
,...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Radcliffe
Critic Margaret Doody
identifies Emily's poem The Sea-Nymph as a response to Anna Seward
's Song of the Fairies to the Sea-nymphs, while Rictor Norton
notes that the incident in which Emily hears gondoliers...
Occupation
Frances Reynolds
Samuel Johnson
was eager to sit for her, and did so on three occasions: in March 1775, in June 1780, and in summer 1783. He may have been sitting for her on the day before...
