CHETWOOD, Anna Maria.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Blue-Stocking Hall. First edition, with a gift inscription on the second blanks of all three volumes, "J. Janet Erskine from her affec. friend F. Hamilton". Lady Jean Janet Erskine (1810-1861) was the author's niece, and the inscription is likely from one of her relatives. There are also multiple ink annotations in an early hand, editing and correcting the text in line with the errata.The novel advocates for women's education, contrasting the artifice of fashionable Regency society to the simplicity of a life devoted to education. The authorship of this anonymously published book has long been debated. The work was long attributed to William Pitt Scargill (1787-1836), a Unitarian minister and novelist from East Anglia, although the archives of the publisher Henry Colburn indicate that the novel was written by a "Mrs Wilmot". It has been argued that Alicia Wilmot (1776-1860) was one of Anna Maria Chetwood's sisters-in-law. Alicia Wilmot, however, never married, leaving the strongest attribution to the Irish antiquarian John Windele, who identified the author as Anna Maria Chetwood in his Historical and Descriptive Notices of the City of Cork (1840).

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