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Hester Thrale
Hester Thrale
Courtesy of
Walter Scott (c. 1947)
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Hester
Thrale (Piozzi) was born in Bodvel,
Caernarvonshire, Wales in 1741. Her
parents, Hester and John Salusbary, were
wealthy and powerful members of Welsh society.
She was the only child, and was educated
in several modern languages, as well as
logic and rhetoric.
Hester was married twice.
First, she married Henry Thrale in 1763,
a prosperous brewer. The couple had 12 children,
4 of which lived to adulthood. After Henry
died in 1781, Hester remarried Gabriel Piozzi,
her daughter’s music teacher. This
second marriage was controversial, and not
approved by her Bluestocking colleagues. |
Hester’s association
and writing circle included Guiseppi Baretti,
Edmund Burke, Frances and Charles Burney, David
Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, and
Sir Joshua Reynolds. Hester
was a close friend of Elizabeth
Montagu, whom she met in 1775. She was a strong
writer who used her craft to support herself financially.
Hester was one of the first women to publish in
biographical, anecdotal and travel genres. She
believed strongly in the moral force of literature.
She published a variety of
pieces, including many biographical pieces on
Samuel Johnson, a Bluestocking member. She also
published British Synonymy (1794), a
dictionary of English language usage, and Retrospection
(1801), a world history. One of her most important
publications occurred after her death in 1821.
Thraliana, a record of her public, private
and intellectual life through diaries from 1776
to 1809, was published after her death.
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