Bøker av Hester Lynch Piozzi

The writer and society hostess Hester Lynch Piozzi (1741-1821) is best remembered as a friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson. This enlarged second edition of her autobiographical writings, edited by the essayist Abraham Hayward (1801-84) and incorporating correspondence, marginalia and poetry, was published in 1861.

Highly educated and accustomed to intellectual society, the writer and woman of letters Hester Lynch Piozzi (1741-1821) became a close friend of Samuel Johnson through her first husband, the brewer Henry Thrale. Her second marriage, to the Italian musician Gabriel Mario Piozzi in 1784, estranged her from Johnson, but following his death she published her groundbreaking Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, anticipating Boswell's biography. As well as her letters, poetry, essays, memoirs and travel diaries (several of which are also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection), she was one of the first women to produce works on philology and history. Originally published in 1833, this highly readable volume of recollections by the writer and translator Edward Mangin (1772-1852) draws on her letters to him and his family (as well as on other memorabilia), extracts from which are quoted extensively in the work.

Hester Piozzi's 1789 Observations of her travels around Europe with her second husband is a witty and fascinating account, full of conversational anecdotes and local colour, which today make it a valuable work of social history, as well as the entertaining travel book that it was originally intended to be.