Elizabeth Boyd

Elizabeth Boyd (c. 1710 – 1745) was an English writer and poet who supported her family by writing novels, poetry, a play, and a periodical.

The subscription lists to her work contain many aristocrats which suggests the family had been well connected but had fallen on hard times.

With money from this she set up a stationers shop in George Court, Princes Street, London, near Leicester Fields[5] The Humorous Miscellany of 1733 contains her best known poem On the Death of an Infant of five Days old; being a beautiful but abortive Birth.

[8] Don Sancho takes place in an Oxford College garden and features the ghosts of William Shakespeare and John Dryden.

[5] It contains veiled attacks on the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, who twenty years previously had engaged in Jacobite intrigue but had abandoned their support in favour of what many saw as their own career advancement.