Henrietta Maria Bowdler

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Standard Name: Bowdler, Henrietta Maria
Birth Name: Henrietta Maria Bowdler
Nickname: Harriet
HMB , who published mainly in the early nineteenth century, was an editor, conduct-book writer, theological writer, poet, and novelist. She was also the originator of the project for rendering Shakespeare inoffensive to delicate ears, which is more generally connected with the name of her brother Thomas .
Title-page of Henrietta Maria Bowdler's anonymous "Sermons on the Doctrines and Duties of Christianity", fourth edition, 1803. A contemporary has added the author's name: "Mrs Harriet Bowdler of Bath." This copy bears the ownership stamp of a theological seminary, and a librarian has repeated Bowdler's full name.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Cultural formation Elizabeth Smith
She was confirmed in the Church ofEngland in December 1791, and a letter written her by Henrietta Maria Bowdler on that occasion shows how seriously this was taken both as a spiritual experience and as...
Dedications Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
She dedicated it to Henrietta Maria Bowdler , less in honour of Bowdler herself than in honour of her friendship with and literary executorship of the scholar Elizabeth Smith ; she compares their relationship to...
Education Anne Lister
As an adult she was frequently engaged in serious, self-improving study. Her reading included ancient classics (Demosthenes , Sophocles , Juvenal ) and modern writings on conduct (Henrietta Maria Bowdler 's Essay on...
Friends, Associates Margaret Holford
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...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Smith
Henrietta Maria Bowdler (known as Harriet) met the Smiths in summer 1789, when Elizabeth was twelve, and formed a long-lasting friendship with both her and her mother. Elizabeth met another close friend, Mary Hunt ...
Friends, Associates Anna Margaretta Larpent
In 1776 the future AML recorded meeting the Corsican patriot Paoli and Dr Johnson ye Great.
Feminist Companion Archive.
After her marriage her own and her husband's work brought her into contact with the cultured elite of London...
Friends, Associates Mary Tighe
Before she left London, MT met there her fellow Irish poet Tom Moore . He subsequently visited her in Dublin and complimented her in verse. She exchanged poems with Barbarina Wilmot (later Lady Dacre) ...
Friends, Associates Lady Eleanor Butler
Among their many visitors (apart from the local gentry, with whom they duly established links), close friends included Anna Seward , Henrietta Maria Bowdler (who wrote mock-flirtatiously of LEB as her veillard [sic] or old...
Friends, Associates Ann Radcliffe
Henrietta Maria Bowdler , who must already have known AR socially, wrote to tell her that Elizabeth Carter very much wished to be introduced; Radcliffe declined.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press, 1999.
182-3
Friends, Associates Anna Seward
Nine years later her meeting with the provincial literary hostess Anne, Lady Miller , marked the beginning of a wide and deep acquaintance with the literary world beyond Lichfield.
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1931.
36-7, 71
She was on terms...
Instructor Elizabeth Smith
At three years old ES loved books and at four she could read extremely well.
Smith, Elizabeth. Fragments, in Prose and Verse. Bowdler, Henrietta MariaEditor , Richard Cruttwell, 1809.
215-6
The move to Suffolk brought the Smiths a governess who was only sixteen but whose abilities exceeded her...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Ann Kelty
The book bears in various details the influence of Jane Austen , though its overall project of pious didacticism is at odds with Austen's approach. The title-page quotes Rousseau on the topic of the sensitive...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Smith
Among undated poems Bowdler prints another imitation of Ossian and a translation from the German of Friedrich von Matthisson .
Smith, Elizabeth. Fragments, in Prose and Verse. Bowdler, Henrietta MariaEditor , Richard Cruttwell, 1809.
119-125, 128
In 1803 ES translated a poem by Gessner in response to William Sotheby
Intertextuality and Influence Susan Ferrier
The Inheritance opens with what sounds like an allusion to Jane Austen : It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that there is no passion so deeply rooted in human nature as that of pride.
Cullinan, Mary. Susan Ferrier. Twayne, 1984.
75
Occupation Lady Eleanor Butler
In addition to their better-known activities, the women became antiquarians with a particular interest in women's writing. They copied early texts by women, like Ann Fanshawe 's still unpublished Memoirs. Henrietta Maria Bowdler sent...

Timeline

Around late February 1742
A woman named Margaret Ogle published, with her name, two versesatires on Walpole's fall from power: Mordecai Triumphant, or, the Fall of Haman prime minister of state to King Ahasuerus: an heroic poem and The...
By November 1802
The Society for the Suppression of Vice was founded in London and grew into the gap left by the Proclamation Society ; ironically, it was often called the Vice Society.
By April 1818
Thomas Bowdler published The Family Shakespeare, in fact a further extension of a project begun by his sister Henrietta Maria Bowdler .