Author: Tomlins, Elizabeth Sophia
Biography:
TOMLINS, Elizabeth Sophia (1763-1828: ODNB)
Elizabeth Sophia was the second child and eldest daughter in the large family of Thomas Tomlins (1735-1815), a London solicitor and Clerk of the Painter-Stainers’ Company, and his wife Elizabeth Isabella Guest (1740-1818). She was born on 27 Feb. 1763 and baptised on 7 Mar. By the time she and her elder brother Thomas Edlyne Tomlins (q.v.) published their joint collection of poems, dated from 1783 onwards, in 1797 as “By a Lady and her Brother” she was an established novelist with three anonymous titles to her credit. Her final work of fiction, Rosalind de Tracey, was published under her own name in 1798. Poems in the collection are signed with the initials of the collaborators’ middle names, S and E. While the brother was responsible for slightly over half of the collection, he takes second billing and her long narrative poem “The Slave” is given special attention. She did not marry but was tasked with the education of the younger children and with assisting her father in his practice; according to the GM obituary, she also contributed poems “to nearly every respectable periodical” between 1780 and 1828, and translated a life of Napoleon. After the death of her father in 1815 she retired with her mother and three sisters to their country home, The Firs, in Chaldon, Surrey, where she died on 8 Aug. 1828 after suffering a fall from a pony that had been “startled by the sudden rise of a pheasant” (Oxford Journal). She was buried at the parish church on 15 Aug. (ODNB 1 Sept. 2024; GM 98:2 [1828], 471; Oxford Journal 16 Aug. 1828; ancestry.com 1 Sept. 2024; findmypast.com 1 Sept. 2024; Orlando 1 Sept. 2024)