Excuse my dust: Elizabeth Hamilton
Elizabeth Hamilton was spurred to begin her authorial career by her desire to memorialise her brother, who died young in 1792. Her first book, Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), a satire on contemporary society, was a tribute to him. In her next book, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) she satirized contemporary radicals like William Godwin, but she admired Mary Wollstonecraft and was herself interested in the progressive ideas of the time, particularly in the education of women. In Edinburgh, where she held literary salons, she was influenced by her friend the Enlightenment philosopher Dugald Stewart. Hamilton used fiction as a way of spreading the ideas of the Enlightenment to a wide audience. Her most popular book was a novel – The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1804) – which described the ‘civilising’ impact on a Perthshire village, depicted with lively use of Scots dialogue, of the arrival of Mrs Mason. This unlikely heroine – a middle-aged spinster and retired servant – brings to the countryside the progressive values Hamilton held dear, and becomes a teacher for the village girls. Hamilton herself put her reforming principles into action when she founded a House for Indigent Women in Edinburgh. She died in 1816.
What fiction did she write?
Memoirs of Agrippina (1804) – a ‘semi-fictional didactic biography’
The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808) (ed. Pam Perkins, ASLS, 2010, with a selection of her other writings)
Acknowledgement: 'This document /webpage/text was prepared by Helen Vincent of the National Library of Scotland for the Women's Forum workshop at NLS in 2010, and is re-used here by permission.