Author: Fell, Elizabeth
Biography:
FELL, Elizabeth (1752-80: ancestry.co.uk)
She was baptised at the British Chaplaincy in St. Petersburg, Russia, on 9 Apr. 1752, the daughter of Joseph Fell and Elizabeth Lewis, who had also married in the Chaplaincy, on 19 Jan. 1751. Her mother was the daughter of Vice-Admiral William Lewis, who served in the Russian Imperial Navy for over fifty years and was sometime Governor of Kronstadt and Reval and commander at Archangel in the 1740s. Nothing is known of her education. At an unknown date in the 1750s her parents went to England and settled in Essex where her father is recorded as a Captain in the East Essex militia in 1759, later rising to Lt.-Col. It seems unlikely her parents were Quakers and there is no record of her conversion. However, she is recorded in her first publication, Fables, Odes, and Miscellanious [sic] Poems (1771) as being “of Saffron-Walden” (well known for its Quaker community); and Joseph Smith included her in Friends’ Books (1867). Poems (1777) gave her the courtesy title of “Mrs.” There are no clues to her identity in either volume. She died in the first week of Apr. 1780 and was buried at St. Mary the Virgin, Saffron Walden. Her mother survived her and died in 1792 and it is theoretically possible, though unlikely, that she and not her daughter was the author of the volumes listed here. (Her father also had literary interests and was a subscriber to Bell’s Shakespeare [1788].) (ancestry.co.uk 27 Nov. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 27 Nov. 2024; Friends’ Books 1: 595; Norfolk Chronicle 15 Apr. 1780, 16 June 1792) AA
Other Names:
- Mrs. Elizabeth Fell