In 1814, Mary Hays, poet, essayist and defender of women’s right, moved to Mrs Pennington’s house in Dowry Square, Hotwells, Bristol to be closer to her family. Mrs Pennington, nee Penelope Sophie Weston, had married William Pennington (Master of Ceremonies at Hot Wells) at 41, under the advice of Hester Piozzi. Hays was a subscriber to Dr John Prior Estlin’s Utilitarian Chapel in Lewin’s Mead and a correspondent of Crabb Robinson, to whom she writes that the countryside nearby is pleasing and how she likes to ramble. She also turns description of her fellow borders into diminutive depictions of failed gentility.
Project Layers
- Anti-Apartheid
- Bristol's Industrial Revolution
- Chatterton, Wordsworth and Coleridge
- Deaf community
- Know your Bristol
- Know Your Greenbank
- Knowle West
- Music
- Romantic Era
- Romantic Era Revisited
- Schools
- SMRT family history
- St Katherine's WW1 project
- Theatres of the City
- Vaughan postcard collection
- Women of East Bristol
- Women Writers