Author: Opie, Amelia
Biography:
OPIE, Amelia formerly ALDERSON (1769-1853: ODNB)
Born in Norwich, she was the only child of James Alderson, a dissenting minister, and his wife, Amelia (Briggs). A high-spirited and impulsive child, she was taught by her mother whose death, in 1784, meant that Opie assumed responsibility for running her father’s household. Through him, she met other liberal dissenters and controversial political figures—Thomas Holcroft, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Horne Tooke, and Elizabeth Inchbald. Her first novel, Dangers of Coquetry, was published in 1790, and a play, Adelaide, was performed in Norwich with the aid of James Plumptre (q.v.) and his sisters (both also writers). In 1798 she married John Opie, a successful painter who was very supportive of her writing career; they had no children. They lived in London and were part of an intellectual and cultural elite both there and in Paris which they visited in 1802. Although Opie wrote and published poetry throughout her life (she contributed extensively to periodicals and the popular annuals), it was particularly as a novelist that she was celebrated in her lifetime; such works as The Father and Daughter (1801), Adeline Mowbray (1804), and her various collections of tales (1806, 1813, 1818, 1820) were issued in numerous editions, critically and popularly acclaimed, and highly remunerative for her. After John Opie’s early death in 1807, she returned to her father’s Norwich home. She began attending Quaker services in 1814 and, in 1825, the year her father died, she joined the Society of Friends (although he was not a Quaker, her father requested burial in the Friends’ cemetery). Becoming a Quaker led her to embrace philanthropic work and—although she continued writing poetry—to abandon all but the most strictly didactic fiction. In later life, she travelled in Europe and Scotland, and spent time in London where she visited the Great Exhibition in 1851. She died at Norwich and was buried in her father’s grave. (ODNB 26 May 2020)
Other Names:
- A. Opie
- Mrs. Opie