Elizabeth Helme

Elizabeth Helme (née Horrobin; 8 August 1743 – 1 January 1814) was a prolific English novelist, educational writer, and translator active in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Elizabeth Helme was likely born in County Durham, England, to a family tentatively identified by the name of Horrobin.

Elizabeth Helme is also known to have worked as a teacher, and her translations included two children's plays by Joachim Heinrich Campe: Cortez (1799) and Pizarro (1800), and much of her writing was aimed for younger readers.

Helme published her first, anonymous novel, Louisa; or, The Cottage on the Moor in 1787, and it remained one of her most successful publications[1] Her work first appeared under her own name with The Farmer of Inglewood Forest, published by the popular Minerva Press in 1796.

Despite both she and her husband working as headmistress and schoolmaster, respectively, at Brentford, and her considerable literary output, the family suffered continual financial difficulties and the Royal Literary Society retain records of various applications for assistance, including one from novelist Lucy Peacock to help with Helme's burial in 1814.