Wilmer Gossip

John Yearsley's family had formerly been inn-keepers, though he later worked as a farm labourer. Hannah More may have been prejudiced in calling him so stupid as to be incapable of any but the most...

Elizabeth's father, Miles Dawson , was land-agent to the local proprietor Wilmer Gossip . He cherished his only child, although when she was seven her grandmother Mrs Brudend took her away for a while...

After the debacle with More , AY acquired a higher-status patron in Frederick Augustus Hervey, Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry , a man who could afford to ignore public opinion, and who supported...

By the following year she had established a correspondence with her father's employer, Wilmer Gossip , which reveals an astonishingly relaxed and equal relationship between them.

As early as March-April 1788 AY 's backers Eliza Dawson and Wilmer Gossip were suggesting that a play would offer a better chance of financial return than poetry. Yearsley drafted her lost play Bawdin at...

This friendship was built on a shared interest in literature, in patronising the poor or socially oppressed who aspired to writing, in encouraging inoculation and in promoting Sunday schools. Eliza was interested particularly in the...

In this volume she meant to prove that her poetry was even better when not tampered with by Hannah More . Her Preface relates the circumstances of their quarrel over the terms of the trust...

AY added thirty-eight extra lines in ink to her poem Addressed to Friendship in a copy of her Poems, on Various Subjects (published in 1787), directing the new lines to her patron Wilmer Gossip .

During the time she was preparing these poems for publication, Yearsley equipped herself with a new team of patrons: Wilmer Gossip , a Yorkshire landowner with poor health, who was given to spending time at...

By about 17 November 1788 AY had completed the draft of another tragedy, on the subject of the Carthaginian general Hamilcar , of which she then sent a copy to Wilmer Gossip .

A small selection of extracts from EF 's letters before her marriage were included in her Autobiography. From the age of sixteen the then Eliza Dawson corresponded with Wilmer Gossip , her father's employer.

AY took the opportunity of mentioning to Wilmer Gossip on 17 November 1788 that she had just spent a week at Bath, but that she had found its Circle of fashionable Dissipation uncongenial, and...