Esther Lewis (poet)

Esther Lewis, (1716 - 1794) was an English poet who published in the fashionable Bath Journal and occasionally in the Gentleman's Magazine. She is also known by her pen name of Sylvia and her later married name of Esther Clark.[1]

She was the daughter of a clergyman Rev John Lewis of Holt , Wiltshire.[2] She had a mentor in Dr Samuel Bowden, her doctor who had treated her through a smallpox infection and who was impressed by her talent. Bowden regularly published his own poetry in the Bath Journal and, encouraged her to write and publish poetry there too. He promoted her with a poem of his own entitled To a Young Lady of Holt on her most Ingenious Poems (1749) [2][3]

After the death of her father she married Robert Clark of Tetbury in 1760 and moved there.[2]

Her best known poem is Advice to a Young Lady Lately Married (1752). Her works were popular and reprinted over the subsequent decades. She arranged a collection of her own works at the prompting of her husband, which were published for charity in 1789, as Poems Moral and Entertaining. This contains a letter to an anonymous lady in London who is thought to be Sarah Fielding, sister of Henry Fielding, whom she had befriended at Bath around 1758.[2][3]

She died at Tetbury in 1794 and is buried there.[3]

References
  1. Esther Lewis Clark in The Cambridge Companion to Women's Writing in Britain, 1660–1789, Cambridge Companions to Literature, Catherine Ingrassia ED, Cambridge University Press, (2015) ,pages xiv and 5 ISBN 131629823X
  2. Ester Clark in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Eighteenth-Century Writers and Writing 1660 - 1789 Paul Baines, Julian Ferraro, Pat Rogers , page 67, pub John Wiley & Sons, 2010 ISBN 1444390082
  3. Lonsdale, Roger (ed) (1990). Esther Lewis in Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology. Oxford University Press. page 225. ISBN 0192827758.
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