The Intimate Letters of Hester Piozzi and Penelope Pennington, 1788-1821

These are not formal letters. They are two brilliant women talking frankly about love, scandal, loss, and what it meant to think in an age that did not easily credit women with minds. Hester Piozzi, recently widowed and newly married to an Italian musician (a marriage that set English society abuzz with disapproval), found in Penelope Pennington a correspondent equal to her wit. The correspondence begins in 1788 and stretches across three decades, carrying us through the deaths of children, the gossip of Bath and London, the reading public's hunger for Samuel Johnson's words (Piozzi had been his friend and would become his biographer), and the slow changing of a world. What makes these letters astonishing is their candor: here is Hester railing against her critics, confessing loneliness, describing the terror of illness, joking about the absurdities of courtship. Here is Penelope, steady and sharp, offering counsel and receiving confidences. Together they construct an intellectual and emotional world that the public sphere would have denied them. For anyone interested in how women actually lived inside the 18th century, rather than how textbooks describe it, this correspondence is indispensable.