Author: Evance, Sarah
Biography:
EVANCE, Sarah, later HOOPER (1789-1823: ancestry.co.uk, death notices)
She was the daughter of John Evance (1745-1815) and his second wife, Sarah Merriman. He was a printer, stationer and bookseller in Queen Street, Cheapside, who later went into partnership with William Suttaby. In July 1811, William Fox joined them to form the publisher Suttaby Evance Fox. Her first volume, Poems (1808), was published with the assistance of James Clarke who was probably a relative of the George Clarke who married her sister Anna in 1811. The identities of her other siblings are revealed in the poems and in John Evance’s will of 1815. (Several of her poems had first appeared in David Carey’s Poetical Magazine [1804] under the signature S. E.) She married Benjamin Hooper (1788-1868), the son of a local Quaker apothecary and sometime surgeon, in Islington in 1814. After her marriage she seems to have embraced Quaker religious views and her second volume, A Poem (1818), published by her father’s firm, was characterised by missionary zeal and Quaker gloom. A combination of her husband’s bankruptcy and missionary zeal led them to travel to Canada where she worked as a schoolteacher. She gave birth on 31 August 1823 to a son who died five days later. She died at Niagara, Ontario, 2 October 1823, probably due to childbirth complications. (ancestry.co.uk 17 Jul. 2020; findmypast.co.uk 17 Jul. 2020; Marriage Cert.; Will of John Evance 1815; The Times 4 Dec. 1823; The Niagara Gleaner 4 October 1823; Kingston Chronicle 17 Oct. 1823; Burials at Niagara, Ontario Historical Society [1901]) AA
Other Names:
- Miss S. Evance
- Miss S[arah] Evance
- Mrs. B. Hooper