Author: Gooch, Elizabeth Sarah
Biography:
GOOCH, Elizabeth Sarah, formerly Villa-Real (1757-1807: Orlando)
Her parents were William (formerly Abraham) Villa-Real (1729-59), a wealthy Sephardic Jew whose father had been a Portuguese refugee, and his wife Elizabeth Hallifax (1736-97); they had married on 17 Nov. 1755. She was their only child and was born at the family estate of Edwinstowe, Nottinghamshire, on 27 June 1757. Her father died when she was two and her mother married Capt. William Hutchinson on 11 Oct. 1763; the family then moved to Durham. She was educated at a girls’ boarding school in Chelsea and spent time in Bath with her mother. On 13 May 1775 she married William Gooch (1749-1833), a fortune-hunter who was the youngest son of Sir Thomas Gooch, at St. George’s, Hanover Square. She was a minor, aged seventeen, and married with the permission of her mother. The couple had two sons but in 1778 William Gooch accused her of infidelity and banished her to France. He rented lodgings for her at Lille and abandoned her there. He now had control of her wealth and allowed her a limited annual income. She embarked on a string of relationships with different men and William Gooch divorced her in 1781. She returned to England where she occasionally worked as an actor but she was incarcerated in the Fleet prison for debt. Her pamphlet, An Appeal to the Public, On the Conduct of Mrs. Gooch, was written in prison and published in 1788. Gooch later wrote a three-volume autobiography, Memoir of Mrs. Gooch (1792); it was followed by Poems in 1793. Poems includes “Fountains Abbey. Inscribed to the Memory of Doctor Thomas Crawford”—addressed to a man with whom she had fallen in love before her marriage. The concluding poem in the book is by “Anthony Pasquin” or John Williams (q.v.). Gooch turned to writing novels and wrote five, beginning with The Contrast in 1794; they were moderately successful. In 1801 she arranged publication of a novel by Thomas Bellamy (q.v., 1745-1800), The Beggar Boy, and included her memoir of the author; the book gives her address as 20 Michael’s Place, Brompton, London. In 1804 she published Can We Doubt It?, a translation of a French novel. From the beginning her works met with mixed reviews but they became increasingly discouraging. Gooch was living at Plymouth, Devon, when she died in June 1807. (Orlando; ancestry.co.uk 16 Oct. 2024; WPHP 16 Oct. 2024; EN2; Elizabeth Gooch, An Appeal to the Public [1788])
Other Names:
- Mrs. Villa-Real Gooch
- Mrs. [Elizabeth Sarah] Gooch