Book Description

This is the first biography to foreground the importance of Hester Lynch Piozzi’s Welsh heritage throughout her long life. As one anonymous reader put it, ‘Few eighteenth-century Welsh writers long resident in England continued to identify as strongly with their homeland.’ Born in an obscure plwyf in Caernarvonshire the salonnière of Streatham was finally laid to rest in the vault of Tremeirchion church in the Vale of Clwyd. Hester had been mortified at the failure of her brewer husband Henry Thrale, and her mentor Dr Samuel Johnson, to appreciate the beauties of Wales. But her second husband, musician Gabriel Piozzi, was so enamoured that he proposed residing there. Newly-found confidence inspired Piozzi to write in her middle age, and her daringly personal biography (1786) and edition of Johnson’s letters (1788) were runaway bestsellers. Her travel book (1789) treated the reader for the first time as an intimate friend, recounting her love affair with her husband’s homeland in Italy, whose landscape reminded her so much of Wales.