Hester Lynch Piozzi

Born Hester Lynch Salusbury in 1741, she became widely known first as Hester Thrale and later as Hester Lynch Piozzi. She was an important British writer, diarist, and hostess whose home became a gathering place for major literary figures, especially Samuel Johnson.

Her reputation rests on the quick intelligence and warmth of her journals, letters, and memoirs. She wrote about conversation, society, and travel with an observant eye, and her recollections of Johnson helped shape how later readers understood him and the world around him.

After the death of her first husband, the brewer Henry Thrale, she married the Italian musician Gabriel Piozzi. That marriage caused controversy at the time, but she continued to write and publish, leaving behind a body of work that gives modern readers an unusually lively picture of 18th-century literary and social life.