Author: Celesia, Dorothea
Biography:
CELESIA, Dorothea, formerly MALLET (1738-90: ODNB)
The younger of two children born to David Mallet, a playwright from Scotland who had converted to the Church of England from Catholicism, and his first wife Susanna, she was baptised on 11 Oct. 1738 in Chiswick, Middlesex. Her mother died in Jan. 1742 and her father married Lucy Elstob in Oct. of the same year. David Mallet was appointed under-secretary to Frederick, Prince of Wales, in May 1742. Dorothea was educated at home with her brother, Charles, and two half-sisters. In July 1758 at Hampton, Middlesex, she married a Genoese diplomat, Pietro Paolo Celesia; they had two daughters and lived in Genoa from Sept. 1759. Celesia adopted the Roman Catholic faith of her husband. She had literary and theatrical friends in England with whom she corresponded; these included David Garrick and Edward Gibbon. Garrick worked with her to revise her play, Almida, which adapts Voltaire’s Tancrede. In Jan. 1771 the play was successfully produced with a prologue by William Whitehead (q.v.) at Drury Lane. Little is known of her life after the publication of Indolence: A Poem in 1772--a poem which may have influenced William Cowper's (q.v.) The Task (1785). She died at Genoa in Sept. 1790, survived by her husband who died in 1806. (ODNB 1 Mar. 2022; Orlando 1 Mar. 2022; David Mallet, Poems and Songs [1857]; ancestry.co.uk 1 Mar. 2022; Ipswich Journal 22 May 1742; Scots Magazine 1 Oct. 1742) SR
Other Names:
- Mrs. Dorothea Celesia