Elizabeth Hamilton

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Standard Name: Hamilton, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Hamilton
Nickname: Eliza Hamilton
In her own day EH was best known and loved for My Ain Fireside (a song expressive of national Scottish feeling and the glorification of the domestic) and for Cottagers of Glenburnie, 1808, a novel of domestic improvement. In later generations her satire on the Jacobins has got her type-cast as an unmitigated conservative. In fact her writings in many genres (poems, novels, essays, biography, and writings on education, religion, and philosophy) combine a scholarly and an ironic bent, and her conservatism includes a strong streak of feminism. Her novels make less use than most of the marriage plot, and she presents single women as strong and admirable.
Portrait of Elizabeth Hamilton by Sir Henry Raeburn. The dark but vivid painting suits her olive skin and curly, dark (unpowdered) hair. She is wearing red velvet with a matching kerchief on her head, and holding some small object in her hands.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Mary Russell Mitford
MRM was said to have learned to read by the time she was three. In January 1806 she got through fifty-five volumes, including books by Sarah Harriet Burney , Maria Edgeworth , Elizabeth Hamilton ,...
Family and Intimate relationships Margaret Bingham Countess Lucan
MBCL 's son, Richard, who eventually succeeded his father as second Earl Lucan , was born on 4 December 1764. He was a cultured art-collector, and married a divorcee with whom he had had an...
Family and Intimate relationships Archibald Alison
His father , who confusingly bore the same name as his best-known son, was a clergyman, a writer on the subject of taste, and the dedicatee of Elizabeth Hamilton 's A Series of Popular Essays...
Family and Intimate relationships Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Among EOB 's literary friends, Elizabeth Hamilton was special. When Benger mentions Hamilton's delight in fostering unprotected talent, especially female talent, she is probably thinking of her own. She prints letters which are almost certainly...
Family and Intimate relationships Lady Caroline Lamb
Her mother then fell ill; Caroline was persuaded that she was to blame and in early September, her parents and husband bore her off to Bessborough House in Kilkenny, Ireland.
Douglass, Paul. Lady Caroline Lamb. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
126
Her exchange of...
Friends, Associates Maria Edgeworth
In Edinburgh she met Professor Dugald Stewart , his wife Helen , and the writer Elizabeth Hamilton , with whom she developed a friendship continued by correspondence.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon, 1972.
197-9
Another writer whom she befriended closer to home was Mary Leadbeater .
Friends, Associates Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
She knew other distinguished writers from the previous generation too, and her friends both before and after her marriage included many in the world of literature. A couple of years after this she spent the...
Friends, Associates Lucy Aikin
LA met Elizabeth Hamilton while visiting Edinburgh.
Feminist Companion Archive.
Friends, Associates Mary Hays
This was her most formative and most famous friendship. She had approached Wollstonecraft after the latter published Vindication of the Rights of Woman early that same year. Wollstonecraft proved a valuable professional mentor. Another relationship...
Friends, Associates Eliza Fletcher
EF developed a close friendship and a correspondence with Elizabeth Hamilton .
Fletcher, Eliza. Autobiography of Mrs. Fletcher, of Edinburgh. Editor Richardson, Mary, Lady, Printed at the offices of C. Thurman for private circulation, 1874.
78
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Having already praised many contemporary women writers in print, EOB was now able to meet them. The move to London was accomplished principally through the zealous friendship of Miss Sarah Wesley , who had already...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Smith
They met and spent time with Elizabeth Hamilton and her sister, Katherine Blake , when these two visited the Lakes in May 1802.
Smith, Elizabeth, 1776 - 1806. Fragments, in Prose and Verse. Editor Bowdler, Henrietta Maria, Richard Cruttwell, 1809.
157
Mrs Smith felt that the Quaker poet Thomas Wilkinson was one...
Friends, Associates Mary Martha Sherwood
MMS judged Anna Seward to be greedy for flattery, especially from the opposite sex. In 1799 she met Hannah More , who was then at the height of her fame and to whom admittance was...
Intertextuality and Influence Lucy Aikin
Her model for this genre was Elizabeth Hamilton , but the influence of Catharine Macaulay is discerned by Karen O'Brien in Aikin's Whig positioning and in her self-confidently judgemental tone.
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
218
This work was reissued...
Intertextuality and Influence Eliza Haywood
A more recent generation of feminist scholars has succeeded in locating EH in the developing tradition of women's fiction. Critic Mary Anne Schofield has argued that her heroines are feisty feminists. Paula Backscheider points out...

Timeline

1785: Dr George Gregory (friend of Elizabeth Hamilton)...

Building item

1785

Dr George Gregory (friend of Elizabeth Hamilton ) published with Joseph JohnsonEssays Historical and Moral, which expresses feminist and reforming sentiments.
Robinson, Shareen. Revolutionary Novels. University of New South Wales, 2000.
145

1805: George Nicholson compiled and published at...

Women writers item

1805

George Nicholson compiled and published at Poughnill near Ludlow in ShropshireThe Advocate and Friend of Woman, an anthology of excerpts.
Women Writers of the (long) English Regency. Stuart Bennett Rare Books & Manuscripts, 2009.
42

1816: Thomas Love Peacock published his anonymous...

Writing climate item

1816

Thomas Love Peacock published his anonymous satirical novel Headlong Hall.
Quarterly Review. J. Murray.
19 (1815): 574

1901: The publication of George Douglas Brown's...

Writing climate item

1901

The publication of George Douglas Brown 's novel The House with the Green Shutters marked the first attack on the Scottish school of fiction that was afterwards known as Kailyard.
Campbell, Ian. Kailyard. Ramsay Head, 1981.
7-17
Blake, George. Barrie and the Kailyard School. Arthur Barker, 1951.
9-18
Dickson, Beth. “Annie S. Swan and O. Douglas: Legacies of the Kailyard”. A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, edited by Douglas Gifford et al., Edinburgh University Press, 1997, pp. 329-46.
329, 340
Hart, Francis Russell. The Scottish Novel: From Smollett to Spark. Harvard University Press, 1978.
114

Texts

Hamilton, Elizabeth. Essays on the Mind. Manners and Miller, 1813, 2 vols.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Exercises in Religious Knowledge. 1809.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Hints to the Patrons of Schools. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. “Introduction”. Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, edited by Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell, Broadview, 1999, pp. 7-50.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. 1st ed., G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796, 2 vols.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. Editors Perkins, Pamela and Shannon Russell, Broadview, 1999.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Letters on Education. G. G. and J. Robinson, 1801.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Letters to the Daughter of a Nobleman. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1806, 2 vols.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. 2nd ed., G. G. and J. Robinson, 1800, 3 vols.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. Editor Grogan, Claire, 2000.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina, the Wife of Germanicus. G. and J. Robinson, 1804, 3 vols.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. The Cottagers of Glenburnie. Manners and Miller, and S. Cheyne, 1808.