Elizabeth Griffith
Elizabeth Griffith (1727 – 5 January 1793)[1] was an 18th-century Welsh-born dramatist, fiction writer, essayist and actress, who lived and worked in Ireland.
[citation needed] "The family settled in Dublin, where they brought up Elizabeth to be a sociable child, cheerful and at ease among the theatrical community".
Through her son, her descendants included Australian politician Arthur Hill Griffith, who was her grandson, and French-Canadian actress Jessica Paré.
[3] Elizabeth and Richard's five year courtship provided the basis for her first publication, A Series of Genuine Letters Between Henry and Frances, published in six volumes between 1757 and 1770.
While she praised Garrick as a primary influence, the connections she made at Smock Alley Theater in Dublin contributed more to the play's production.
Of these plays, The School for Rakes was the most popular, and earned Elizabeth enough money to place her son into the East India Company.
The Delicate Distress (1769) was published alongside a work of her husband's, a novel titled The Gordian Knot (1769), in a four-volume set.
But, though she had to package it differently in order to retain an audience, she never fully lost her focus on women's issues, and her female characters are always the moral superiors of their male counterparts.
This was likely the first reassessing of Behn's work particularly, but that of women writers in general, and illustrates the important premium Griffith placed upon proper morality.
In the "letters", genuine sentimentality is the mode of discourse, and women seem to have been drawn to Griffith as a model of womanhood, illustrating sought-after traits such as intelligence, reflection, and humour.
Frances Burney wrote in her journal that the Letters "are doubly pleasing, charming to me, for being genuine—they have encreased my relish for minute, heartfelt writing, and encouraged me in my attempt to give an opinion of the books I read.
The crowd responded with "shouts for and against [...] apples and half-pence were thrown, a chandelier broken",[citation needed] and the performance was cancelled.
This unexpected setback forced Griffith to publish the play by subscription; the subscribers included Gertrude Russell, Duchess of Bedford, Edmund Burke, James Boswell, Elizabeth Montagu, and Sir Joshua Reynolds.
[citation needed] According to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, modern historians of drama have generally considered Griffith's plays "undistinguished, often dramatically inept and tediously sententious" (175).
Modern readers often feel uncomfortable with the conflicting relationship between women's ability and wifely duty and the general tone of subordination to men encompassed within the play.
