In order to find information about Hester Lynch Piozzi (1741-1821), one used to have to look her up under "Mrs. Thrale." When she was dubbed Thrale rather than Piozzi, it was a given that one would mention her alongside Samuel Johnson and compare and contrast their productions and mutual influence. The Thrales' small salon was, after all, home to Johnson and was frequented by Edmund Burke, Frances and Charles Burney, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, among others. To call Piozzi "Thrale," however, is to highlight the hostess and thus to miss a significant portion of her life--particularly her publishing life.

Hester Lynch Piozzi has always been a literary historical figure of some renown. She might be added to the short list of eighteenth-century women writers who never really disappeared from view. Piozzi has attracted both longstanding and recent critical attention. Today's scholarship on Piozzi has been undertaken by some of the most respected researchers in the field. Nevertheless, Piozzi's position as an author has not been as secure as we might wish, in large part because her "recognition as a writer is not so certain . . . . Conventionally her writings have been valued as sidelights on Johnson or disesteemed as imitations of him; her very career as a writer has often been thought to be an accident produced by her association with him," as William McCarthy argues.1

Piozzi is best known for her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786) and Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson (1788), which went through several editions, as did her less successful travel memoir, Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy and Germany (1789).2 Though Observations and Reflections has found fewer readers over the years, John Dussinger has recently called it "probably her best published work" with "firmer narrative control."3 Piozzi's later publications, British Synonymy (1794)--an etymological study--and Retrospection (1801)--a two-volume world history--have been largely ignored. Retrospection was such a profound critical flop that critics have suggested it effectively ended her publishing career. After 1801, Piozzi's only known publication was an anonymous anti-Napoleonic broadside, "Old England to Her Daughters" (1803). In this text, England (imagined as an old woman) calls on her daughters not to faint or fall into fits in the face of French enemies but to remain strong and calm. Piozzi's last unpublished work furthered her interest in the etymology of names and was titled, "Lyford Redivivus or A Granddame's Garrulity." When this work was presented (unsuccessfully) to a publisher, Piozzi had signed herself merely "An Old Woman." She once referred to herself as one of the Antiquities of Bath. She outlived almost all of her contemporaries, both of her husbands, and most of her offspring, dying at age 80 in 1821.

Notes

1. William McCarthy, "The Writings of Hester Lynch Piozzi: A Bibliography." Bulletin of Bibliography 45, no. 2 (1988): 129-141 (129). [return to text]

2. For information on the editions printed of each of these works, see James Clifford, Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale). 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 462-3. (46). [return to text]

3. See John Dussinger, "Hester Piozzi, Italy, and the Johnsonian Aether." South Central Review 9, no. 4 (1992): 46. [return to text]

WebCounter says this many people have visited the site since November 26, 2000: