Lady Mary Hamilton

She was the youngest daughter of Alexander Leslie, 5th Earl of Leven and the mother of James Walker, a Rear admiral in the British Royal Navy.

Her most successful novel, Munster Village (1778), centres on a utopian garden city populated with fallen women and females escaping disastrous marriages.

[6] Two of her daughters with Walker, Isabelle and Betzy, married respectively the dramatist Victor-Joseph Étienne de Jouy and General Paul Thiébaut.

[5] After Hamilton's death, Lady Mary lived near Amiens, where she was very close to the writer Sir Herbert Croft.

[10] In 1815, (in alternate sources, at age 75[5]) she went to Jamaica, as she believed she was being cheated financially out of some of her husband's estates, which had produced £3000 per annum but were now yielding £400.

[1] The discrepancy may arise out of a delay in proving Lady Mary's will, which took until 5 July 1822 to be settled[1] in favour of Sophia and her son Lieutenant-Colonel Leslie Walker.

[15] Her most successful work, Munster Village (1778), centres on a utopian garden city[7] and features themes of intellectual equality, especially in marriage.

[3] Christine Rees has termed it "a drama of family relationships" which features the strong "moral sentiment" common to many 18th-century writers.

[18] The Monthly Review commends the "just observations, useful reflections and pertinent allusions to natural and civil history" found in Memoirs of the Marchioness de Louvoi.

[19] However its review of The Life of Mrs. Justman is scathing, speaking of the "absurd, incoherent and contradictory political reasoning with which these volumes abound" and finding its best feature to be that 75 pages of the manuscript were destroyed by fire.

[7] However, McMillan posits that her works "have little to offer modern readers"[1] and The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English has critiqued her stories for plagiarizing from others.

[7] Alessa Johns also notes the plagiarism but argues that rather than be a self-serving attribute, it reflects Lady Mary's view of a "public-spirited will to share and democratize" ideas and a sincere form of flattery.

[21] Indeed, one of her characters in Letters from the Duchesse de Crui says to not call her "a plagiarist... from whatever author I may have borrowed them, I shall give their names, when I recollect them: but to trace the origin of my ideas, would be an endless task".