Lady Mary Hamilton
| Lady Mary Hamilton | |
|---|---|
| Husband | Dr. James Walker George Robinson Hamilton |
| Father | Alexander Leslie, 5th Earl of Leven |
| Mother | Elizabeth Monypenny |
| Born |
8 May 1736 Melville House, Fife, Scotland |
| Died | 28 February 1821 (aged 84) Brompton, Middlesex, England |
Lady Mary Hamilton or Lady Mary Walker (née Leslie; 8 May 1736 – 29 February 1821) was a Scottish novelist of the 18th century. She was the youngest daughter of Alexander Leslie, 5th Earl of Leven and the mother of James Walker, a Rear admiral in the British Royal Navy.
Her works included discussions of philosophy, education and art. Advanced in thinking for the time period, she was a strong advocate of education for women. Her most successful novel, Munster Village (1778), centres on a utopian garden city populated with fallen women and females escaping disastrous marriages. Jane Austen may have been influenced by her writings, taking the same names as some of Lady Mary's characters.
Lady Mary Leslie was born at Melville House, Fife, Scotland on 8 May 1736, the youngest daughter of Alexander Leslie, fifth earl of Leven and Melville, by his second wife Elizabeth, daughter of David Monypenny.
On 3 January 1762, Lady Mary was married to Dr. James Walker of Innerdovat, Fife. He was a physician based at Edinburgh's prison infirmary and heavily in debt. Though the marriage was unhappy, it was said to have produced ten children. At least half must have died in infancy; the Scots Peerage, followed by McMillan, asserts three sons and one daughter though other sources point to two Walker daughters, Isabella (Bell) and Elizabeth (Betzy). (A grandson, Baron Adolphe Thiébault, raised questions about the paternity of Lady Mary's children, in an 1863 history.) Lady Mary was estranged from Walker, who moved alone to Jamaica in the 1770s to take up a position there as a prison physician.
Lady Mary turned to writing to provide for her family. She would later note to a friend that "with a family of young children… abandoned by their father," she was forced to "cloath, feed, and educate them". She thus needed to support herself, producing her first novel Letters from the Duchesse de Crui (1777).
Lady Mary was introduced by her husband to George Robinson Hamilton and – accounts vary – sometime after Walker's death, (alternatively, without divorcing Walker) she went away with or married Hamilton, a cousin of Alexander Hamilton, 10th Duke of Hamilton and owner of a sugar plantation in Jamaica. She took Hamilton's name, and she and George settled in Lille, France in 1782, where he is described as a cloth merchant and they as living in great style. Two of her daughters with Walker, Isabelle and Betzy, married respectively the dramatist Victor-Joseph Étienne de Jouy and General Paul Thiébaut. Again, accounts vary: Lady Mary had two daughters with Hamilton, or had at least one surviving daughter with Hamilton, Sophia Saint John Hamilton Alderson.
...
Wikipedia