Susanna Keir, née Harvey (1747 – 20 November 1802) was a British novelist. Her two novels, "largely in epistolatory form, are long on moralizing and short on action."[1]
Life
editSusanna Harvey married the chemist and poet James Keir, a friend of Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley and supporter of the French Revolution. At the time of their marriage, another acquaintance, William Small, wrote "Mr Keir has turned glassmaker at Stourbridge and has married a beauty".[2]
Though his manufacturing business was based in Birmingham and Dudley, Susanna wrote her novels while living in Edinburgh. The couple had two children. Their son Francis died in infancy,[3] and their daughter, Amelia, married a banker, John Lewis Moilliet. Amelia wrote a privately printed biography of her father in 1859.[1] She recorded that the death of her mother Susanna occurred suddenly on 20 November 1802, and that she was buried at West Bromwich.[3]
Keir is one of the "lost" women writers listed by Dale Spender in Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen.
Works
edit- ("by a lady") Interesting Memoirs, 1785.
- ("by the author of Interesting Memoirs") The History of Miss Greville, Dublin, Edinburgh & London, 1787.
References
edit- ^ a b Ann Willardson Engar (1987). "Susanna Keir". In Janet M. Todd (ed.). A Dictionary of British and American women writers, 1660–1800. Rowman & Allanheld. p. 183. ISBN 978-0-8476-7125-0.
- ^ Jenny Uglow (2002). The Lunar Men. Faber. p. 162. ISBN 978-0571196470.
- ^ a b "James Keir". West Bromwich Local History Society. Retrieved 3 July 2022.
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