Author: Reynolds, Frances
Biography:
REYNOLDS, Frances (1729-1807: ODNB)
She was the youngest daughter of eleven children born to the Rev. Samuel Reynolds (1681-1745) and his wife Theophilia Potter (1688-1756). Her parents had married at Monkleigh, Devon, on 9 Dec. 1711; among their children was the painter Joshua Reynolds (1723-92). Frances was born in Plympton, Devon, on 10 May 1729 and baptised on 6 June in St. Maurice church. When Joshua Reynolds returned from Italy in 1752 and established a home in St. Martin’s Lane, London, he asked Frances to live with him as his housekeeper. A talented painter, particularly of portraits, she received only minimal instruction from her brother and was largely self-taught. She knew and corresponded with other writers, including Hester Thrale (Piozzi), Samuel Johnson, and Hannah More (qq.v.). Her Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste and the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty was privately printed in 1785 and published in 1789. No extant copy of the book included in this bibliography, A Melancholy Tale; Dark Sentences; A Vision, has been located but it was reviewed in MR. One of the poems in the collection—probably “A Vision”—was lightly edited in red ink for Reynolds by Johnson and the manuscript with his emendations survives in the Hyde collection, Houghton Library, Harvard. Her friend, Anna Williams, included two of Reynolds’s poems, “Rasselas to Imlac” and “An Ode,” in her Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1766). The poems are signed “Stella” and they are followed in the book by one of Williams’s poems, “To Miss ***.” which addresses Reynolds as Stella. In the 1770s Reynolds left her brother’s house—Hester Thrale speculated that the siblings fell out because Joshua felt threatened by his sister’s talents—but he left her financially secure on his death and she spent her final years in a large house in Queen Square, Westminster. She died unmarried at home on 2 Nov. 1807 (ODNB gives 1 Nov. but newspaper notices give 2 Nov.) and was buried in the churchyard of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, on 6 Nov.; she left her estate to a widowed friend and to her niece. (ODNB 6 Dec. 2024; ancestry.co.uk 6 Dec. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 6 Dec. 2024; R. D. Brown & R. DeMaria, The Complete Poems of Samuel Johnson [2024]; Anna Williams, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse [1766]; National Archives UK PROB 11/1474/229; The News [London] 15 Nov. 1807) SR