Author: Bowdler, Henrietta Maria
Biography:
BOWDLER, Henrietta Maria (1752-1830: ancestry.co.uk)
Creation, and Other Poems is attributed to Bowdler but she never claimed the book and there are some aspects—particularly the frequent use of Latin and Greek—which are unusual in her work. One of six children born to Thomas Bowdler (d 1785) and his wife Elizabeth Stuart Cotton (d 1797), she was baptised on 22 Jan. 1752 in Box, Wiltshire, near the family home of Ashley. ODNB and Orlando give her birth details as 1750 in Conington, Huntingdonshire, home of her maternal grandparents, but no birth record has been located. Her siblings were born at Ashley. Her parents had married on 25 Apr. 1742 in St. Pancras, London. Henrietta was raised at Ashley and Bath where she was educated by her scholarly mother whose Practical Observations on the Book of the Revelations was first published in 1787. Her first literary venture was to edit Poems and Essays (1786) by her sister Jane Bowdler (q.v.) who had died of smallpox in 1784. Her anonymous Sermons on the Doctrines and Duties of Christianity (1801) followed and was greatly admired; the author was assumed to be a clergyman. In 1801 she wrote a novel, Pen Tamar, which—on her instructions—was published in 1830 only after her death. The Family Shakespeare, including expurgated versions of twenty plays, was first published in Bath in 1807; an expanded 1818 edition by her brother, Thomas, restored some passages she had cut but omitted others. Neither edition received much notice until 1821 when the merits of the books were debated in Blackwood’s Magazine and the Edinburgh Review; for many years it was widely assumed that Thomas was the primary editor. In 1808 she published Fragments in Prose and Verse by Elizabeth Smith (q.v.) and included a memoir of her friend. Henrietta Bowdler died at home in Park Street, Bath, of smallpox on 25 Feb. 1830; her will, written on 8 Feb. 1830, left most of her estate to a sister, Frances, with smaller legacies to her nieces and nephews. (ODNB 28 July 2023; ancestry.co.uk 28 July 2023; findmypast.co.uk 28 July 2023; Orlando 28 July 2023; PROB 11/1767/363)