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Author: Wallace, Eglantine

Biography:

WALLACE, Eglantine formerly Eglinton Maxwell (b. c. 1754 d 1803: ODNB)

A woman of haughty temper and unwavering determination, known as “Lady Wallace,” she was born “Eglinton” Maxwell at Montreith, Wigtownshire, the youngest daughter of Sir William Maxwell (d 1771) and his wife, Magdalene Blair. Following her parents’ separation, she lived with her mother in poverty. On 4 Sept 1779, now spelling her name “Eglantine,” she married Thomas Dunlop (1750-1835), the son of John Dunlop of Dunlop and his wife, Frances Anna, the daughter of Sir Thomas Wallace of Craigie (1702-1770). When he inherited Craigie, Dunlop took his maternal grandfather’s surname. There were two boys by the marriage; the eldest was General Sir John Alexander Dunlop Agnew Wallace (1774/5–1857). The couple legally separated in 1778. Her poem, A Letter to a Friend, a response to Goethe’s (q.v.) Charlotte, is a plea for female education. Notoriously, she entered the House of Commons in male dress; she had an affair with a “fortune-hunting colonel” in Bath; she was twice arrested as a spy, in France in 1789 and in Munich in 1800; and her play The Whim: a Comedy (1795) was banned (in it, she reverses the role of servants and masters). In her play The Ton; or, Follies of Fashion, acted at Theatre Royal, Covent Garden in 1788, she attacked aristocratic corruption and advocated female education and liberalized divorce. In Lady Wallace’s Letter to Capt. William Wallace (1793), she again called upon aristocrats to reform their behaviour. A supporter of Pitt and his war policy, she enjoyed a government pension of £120 per annum. She died at Munich on 28 Mar. 1803. Wallace subscribed to the poems of Ann Yearsley (q.v.). (ODNB 24 Oct. 2023; Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women [2007]) JC

 

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