Author: Francis, Eliza Sarah
Biography:
FRANCIS, Eliza Sarah, later SMITH (1788-1867: RLF)
The daughter of Elizabeth and Samuel Francis, she was born on 19 Dec. 1788 and baptised on 9 Feb. 1789 at St. Mary-the-Great, Cambridge. Samuel Francis (1746-1840) was a banker and city official who served four times as Mayor of Cambridge: in 1788, 1790, 1792, and 1794. He at last went bankrupt, however, and Eliza found work as a governess. Her first publication, The Rival Roses, probably an attempt to improve the family finances, had a long list of Cambridge residents as subscribers and was dedicated to the Duchess Dowager of Rutland. She later went to London, accompanied by her mother, to seek more work, and called on Byron on 24 Oct. 1814 to solicit a subscription for her next book. He treated her with sympathy and gave her a draft for £50. Her account of this and later meetings was published without her name by Watkins in Byron's lifetime in order to demonstrate the poet's capacity for discretion. Many years later she sent another version--with romantic embellishments--to Countess Guiccioli in private letters (Origo). Alluding to Sir Wilibert, Byron mentioned her as one of three female imitators of Scott in "Some Observations upon an Article in Blackwood's Magazine" (15 Mar. 1820). At some point (before 1817 if she contributed to Tributary Tears) she married a man named Smith; they had one daughter. By 1842 when she made the first of several successful appeals to the RLF, she had been widowed "many years," had lived in France teaching English and doing some translating, but had lost her only daughter to illness there and had returned to live alone in London, first in Holborn and then in Brompton. A novel written in France, Jeanne Allenby (1835), she translated herself and published only in French. Back in England she published a translation of Frossard's Picture of the Four Religions (1841), her novel Emmeline (1847), and Wellington Lyrics (1851). But she was desperately poor. Receipts to the RLF, from which she had a total of £120 over twenty-five years, end in Feb. 1867 and on 30 Dec. 1867 the records show that £6 was returned following her death. (RLF file #1050; ancestry.com 24 Oct. 2021; findmypast.com 24 Oct. 2021; Iris Origo, "The Innocent Miss Francis . . . ," Keats-Shelley Journal 1 [1952] 1-9; GM May 1840, 553-4; Helen Cam, "Quo Warranto Proceedings at Cambridge 1780-1790," Cambridge Historical Journal 8:3 [1946] 145-65; John Watkins, Memoirs of . . . Lord Byron [1822] 416-17)
Other Names:
- Miss Francis
- Eliza S. Francis
- Eliza S. F. Smith
- Mrs. Eliza Smith