Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins

Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins wrote novels to pay her own way, wrote memoirs that preserve the Johnson circle from the inside, and spent much of her life defending her father's reputation against Boswell's. She was the daughter of Sir John Hawkins, the magistrate and music historian, and grew up in a house where Johnson, Reynolds and Horace Walpole came to dinner; she acted as her father's amanuensis and copied out much of the History of Music and the Life of Johnson. She began publishing fiction anonymously in the 1780s and produced a long run of novels - The Countess and Gertrude, Rosanne, Heraline - which sold well enough to support her and which she said plainly she wrote for money. She corresponded with Walpole, who lived nearby at Strawberry Hill and who treated her seriously as a literary acquaintance. Her Anecdotes, Biographical Sketches and Memoirs, published in 1822, and the Memoirs of 1824 are her lasting work: they record Johnson's household, Frances Burney's family, the Twickenham neighbourhood and the daily texture of eighteenth-century literary London from a woman's vantage, and they are used by biographers who dismiss her novels entirely. She was combative about Boswell, whose book had made her father a figure of ridicule, and her account is partisan and knows it. She never married and lived at Twickenham. Her brother John Sidney Hawkins edited antiquarian works and quarrelled with almost everyone she did not. She published at least seven novels and a volume on the connection between manners and morals. Her memoirs went through more than one edition in the 1820s. Modern scholarship has begun to read her as a source on female authorship and its economics rather than only as a witness to famous men.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history