Author: Hitchener, Elizabeth
Biography:
HITCHENER, Elizabeth (1783-1821: ancestry.com)
Baptised at Keymer, Sussex, on 22 Apr. 1783, she was the daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth (Greenwood) Hitchener and younger sister of William Henry Hitchener (q.v.). According to a legend of the Shelley circle, her father, a smuggler named Yorke, had changed his name to Hitchener and become an innkeeper at Friar’s (or Frear’s) Oak, Sussex. Certainly his place of residence was Friar’s Oak by 1811. Elizabeth Hitchener owes such fame as she has to the fact that P. B. Shelley (q.v.) idolized her and corresponded with her between June 1811 and June 1812. In 1811 she was teaching school at Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, one of her pupils being Shelley’s cousin Emma Pilfold, whose family lived nearby at Cuckfield. Hitchener and Shelley thought they were soulmates. At the time of meeting he was 18 and she 29. He proposed to share his fortune with her and pressed her to live with him and his first wife, as she eventually agreed to do, but after a few months they turned against her and Shelley cast her off with the promise of an annuity of £100 which was probably never paid. Legend has it that, unable to return to her school on account of scandal, she later worked as a governess on the Continent and married an Austrian officer, but no documents have been found to confirm this story. (When she left the country she deposited the letters she had had from Shelley together with drafts or copies of her side of the correspondence with a lawyer but never reclaimed them. They found their way eventually to the British Museum.) The marriage, if there was one, was unsuccessful: Hitchener returned to England, taught school at Edmonton (now part of London) with a sister, and published Fireside-Bagatelle, a book of enigmas (1818), and The Weald of Sussex (1822, preface dated 9 Aug. 1821) under her maiden name. She died intestate on 4 Dec. 1821, aged 38, at Edmonton and was buried at Keymer on 13 Dec.; her last known address was Union House, Upper Edmonton Parade, Middlesex. (ancestry.com 15 Aug. 2022; findmypast.com 15 Aug. 2022; Bertrand Dobell, ed., Letters from Percy Bysshe Shelley to Elizabeth Hitchener [1908]; Newman Ivey White, Shelley [1972] 1: 645-6n; Public Ledger 11 Dec. 1821; contributions from AA)
Other Names:
- Miss E. Hitchener