Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins

As a novelist (beginning anonymously in the late eighteenth century with a string of novels only recently identified as hers, and still publishing—under her name—forty years later), LMH is always didactic. But while some of her early works treat improbable, often exotic adventures (including clumsy and sensationalized but interesting and unusual treatment of matters involving the female body) her later fiction often sounds as if her goal is opinion-forming rather than story-telling: as if essays (like the sermonets she published with her brother) might have been her natural talent. She also produced translation, travel writing, and a devotional compilation, and as a memoirist she gives full rein to her highly individualised views.