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Hester Lynch (Thrale) Piozzi |
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Although she was a prolific and versatile writer, Hester Lynch [Thrale] Piozzi is remembered primarily for being a friend of Samuel Johnson and for the scathing portrayal of her which James Boswell wrote in his Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). To a certain extent she defies categorization as a person and as a literary figure. In terms of the former, her character is elusive, "a bundle of contradictions," as James L. Clifford, one of her biographers, calls her; in terms of the latter, she was a poet, diarist, and letter writer, but she was also the author of works on English grammar and European history. She was one of the first women to attempt these genres, wherein part of her significance lies. Furthermore, she was one of Johnson's earliest biographers, although the work that she wrote, the Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., During the Last Twenty Years of His Life (1786), has been dwarfed by Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, much as her own life was dwarfed by Johnson's.
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