Elizabeth Griffith

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Standard Name: Griffith, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Griffith
Married Name: Elizabeth Griffith
Pseudonym: A Young Gentlewoman
Pseudonym: Frances
Indexed Name: Mrs Griffith
Pseudonym: E. G.
EG is now best-known as an eighteenth-century novelist and dramatist. But she was best-known in her own lifetime as a writer of fictional letters; and her output as a professional author included translation, short stories, periodical essays, and critical and editorial work.
Stipple engraving in oval frame of Elizabeth Griffith by Mackenzie, after J. Thomas, published 1801. Her head-covering looks like a turban tied in a bow under her chin, with another bow at the stand-away collar of her jacket. Her name appears below as "Mrs Griffith". National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Penelope Aubin
This appeared, like The Life of Madam de Beaumount, with a frontispiece. It is dedicated to Lady Coleraine , with thanks for her patronage of the author's husband .
Though the widow of the...
Anthologization Eliza Haywood
The full title is The Fruitless Enquiry, Being a Collection of Several Entertaining Histories and Occurrences, Which Fell under the Observation of a Lady in her Search after Happiness. The book was included (revised...
Friends, Associates Frances Brooke
As a result of her friendship with the musicologist Charles Burney (1726-1814), FB became a friend of his daughter Frances as well.
McMullen, Lorraine. An Odd Attempt in a Woman: The Literary Life of Frances Brooke. University of British Columbia Press, 1983.
135
Frances Burney liked Brooke, but was worried at her close friendship with...
Intertextuality and Influence Anna Maria Mackenzie
Meanwhile the heroine, Maria Stanley, is unjustly spurned by her husband because he believes the lying insinuations of a jealous and wicked woman whom he has rejected, but the truth is revealed in time for...
Intertextuality and Influence Anna Letitia Barbauld
She was selecting novels for this project in March 1807, but the work was delayed by the catastrophe of her husband's deterioration and suicide. A thousand copies were printed, and her editorial fee was £300....
Intertextuality and Influence Maria Susanna Cooper
The topic of the long-suffering wife became a favourite with later sentimental novelists, notably Elizabeth Griffith in The Delicate Distress, 1769, Lady Barton, 1771, and Lady Juliana Harley, 1776.
Intertextuality and Influence Catherine Hutton
Jane Oakwood says (presumably standing in for her author, as she often does) that in youth she was accused of imitating Juliet, Lady Catesby (Frances Brooke 's translation from Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni ).
Hutton, Catherine. Oakwood Hall. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819.
3: 95
Literary responses Frances Brooke
The Critical Review and Gentleman's Magazine were respectful; the Monthly blamed FB for indelicacy in her heroine and for unfairness to Garrick. It quoted testimonials about his care for their work from other women writers,...
Literary responses Dorothea Celesia
A prologue by William Whitehead mentioned DC 's right to inherit her father's theatrical talent, in spite of her sex: No Salick law here bars the female's claim. It concluded with the statement that critics...
Occupation John Donne
During the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries Donne's writings were largely forgotten or disapproved of. In June 1741 the London Magazine printed a regularised (to modern eyes butchered) version of Goe, and catche a...
Occupation David Garrick
This began his career as theatre manager. One of a manager's duties might be considered to be the putting on of new plays, to ensure the health of the theatre of the future, but familiar...
Publishing Charlotte Brooke
Her father had cherished a never-executed project for a history of ancient Irish literature.
Ashley, Leonard R. N., Aaron Crossley-Seymour, Charlotte Brooke, and Aaron Crossley-Seymour. “Introduction”. Reliques of Irish Poetry, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970, p. v - xv.
vi
She had issued Proposals for this work the year before publication. The Houghton Library copy of the Proposals incorporates a...
Publishing Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette
This book, set in the period which in England was Elizabethan , became notorious before publication through private salon readings. When published in Paris by Barbin , with the author's name withheld, it was immediately...
Reception Aphra Behn
It was frequently adapted and recycled. A French translation by Pierre Antoine de La Place , 1745, sentimentalises the story, provides a happy ending, and adds the Histoire d'Imoinda. As a prose narrative Oroonoko...
Textual Production Elizabeth Meeke
EM published, with her name, "There is a Secret, Find It Out!", a novel which quotes Griffith (probably Elizabeth Griffith ) on its title-page and borrows a character name from her stepsister Frances 's Evelina.
Garside, Peter, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling, editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press, 2000.
2: 281

Timeline

1771
In a year when Sir Joshua Reynolds painted, as Girl Reading, his niece Theophila Palmer perusing Richardson 's Clarissa, five novels by women advertised their Clarissa kinship.
April 1774
The Monthly Review, in a notice on Hannah More 's The Inflexible Captive, quoted some lines which transform the Muses from ancient Greece into the living female poets of Britain.
1777
Richard Samuel engraved his Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (or Portraits in the Character of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo) for Johnson's Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum for 1778...
1780
James Harrison (hitherto chiefly known as a music publisher) began to issue the handsomely-produced Novelists' Magazine, a weekly serial reprinting of canonical novels.