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
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...
Literary responses Maria Edgeworth
The Critical Review notice on Leonora began with oblique reference to Elizabeth Hamilton 's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
3d ser. 7 (1806): 215
It judged that the whole novel is written with great spirit...
Literary responses Sydney Owenson Lady Morgan
Professionally, Morgan was a notable success. She was a canny businesswoman, never afraid to assert herself against an established publisher or seek out a new one. This paid off in a remarkable level of earnings...
Literary responses Mary Hays
This time most reviews were respectful: the Analytical of course, the Monthly (in which William Taylor noted that the novel was a cut above the common run, with serious and unusual moral teaching to impart)...
Literary responses Helen Maria Williams
It talked of the need to counter her poisonous false philosophy with antidotes from the writings of a More , a Hamilton , and a West .
Michael-Johnston, Georgina. Helen Maria Williams: Liberty, Sensibility, and Education. University of Alberta, 1998.
140
Literary responses Jane Austen
Some Austen news items are regrettable. In an interview with the Royal Geographical Society in June 2011, V.S. Naipaul , in asserting his own superiority to women writers (and claiming he could tell male from...
Occupation Catherine Hutton
As well as collecting illustrations of costume, CH was an early collector of autographs. (She began both these collections at a young age, but presumably had to start again from scratch after her losses in...
Publishing Maria Edgeworth
From early in her publishing career ME sent out into the world short pieces as well as longer ones and collections of her own. In this way she placed stories in miscellaneous volumes (The...
Publishing Anne Grant
Among her 3,000 subscribers were Joanna Baillie , Felicia Hemans , Robert Southey , William Wordsworth , Lady Bessborough , her sister Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire , the minor poet Lady Dick , Elizabeth Hamilton
Publishing Catherine Hutton
CH wrote to the publisher Baldwin that Longman's had invited her to contribute to a female paper bearing the names of Barbauld , Inchbald , Edgeworth , and Hamilton .
Hutton, Catherine. Reminiscences of a Gentlewoman of the Last Century. Editor Beale, Catherine Hutton, Cornish Brothers, 1891.
159
Reception Maria Edgeworth
Scholarly and critical work on her ever since Marilyn Butler 's literary biography, 1972, has amassed a significant body of new understanding. In 2009 Susan Egenolf discussed her work in political fiction along with some...
Textual Features Lady Louisa Stuart
LLS 's letters to Scott show her to have been a trusted and perceptive critic of his novels, which she often read before publication. On The Heart of Mid-Lothian she sent him a major critique...
Textual Features May Laffan
In this novel ML returns to the controversy of Irish Home Rule so thoroughly treated in Hogan, M.P., putting criticisms of it into the mouths of middle-class, Protestant Irish residents. The attorney Mr Perry...
Textual Features Lady Eleanor Butler
Particularly worthy of mention is a jaunty, witty, perceptive Hymn to Diana, which addresses the goddess of chastity in the manner of a litany, with a string of petitions. Since Diana has decreed, says...

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