Author: Lee, Harriet
Biography:
LEE, Harriet (1757/8-1851: ODNB)
The third of five surviving children of actors John and Anna Sophia Lee, she was probably born in Dublin where her parents were working at Smock Alley theatre but no birth or baptismal records have been located. Her early life was very unsettled—her parents travelled for work and the family spent time in debtors’ prison—but eventually she settled in Bath with her three sisters where they opened a well-regarded girls’ school in 1780. Her first published work was a novel, The Errors of Innocence (1786), and her comedy, The New Peerage, was performed at Drury Lane in 1787. She was befriended by Hester Thrale Piozzi who tried unsuccessfully to arrange a match between Lee and a member of a Milanese noble family. Her best-known work, Canterbury Tales, was issued as a series (1797-1805); one of the tales, “Kruitzner” in volume 4 (1801), was dramatized by Lord Byron (q.v.) as Werner and by Lee herself as The Three Strangers (performed Dec. 1825, published 1826). She was courted by William Godwin in 1798 but the relationship came to nothing and she never married. She lived with Sophia Lee (q.v.) in Bath until the suicide of another sister, Anna, when they moved first to live with their brother in Manchester, then to Tintern Abbey, and finally to Clifton. There she died of heart failure having outlived all her siblings. Her will left much of her estate including her house, books, and manuscripts to William Ewart, MP, the husband of Lee’s deceased niece. (ODNB 14 June 2021; ancestry.co.uk 14 June 2021)