author
Penelope Pennington
1757–1827
Known today through her letters, this lively figure moved in literary and social circles connected with Hester Lynch Piozzi and other notable women of her time. Her surviving correspondence offers a vivid glimpse of friendship, conversation, and everyday life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
1 Audiobook
The Intimate Letters of Hester Piozzi and Penelope Pennington, 1788-1821
by Hester Lynch Piozzi, Penelope Pennington
About the author
Born Penelope Sophia Weston in 1757, she is generally identified as Penelope Pennington after her marriage. Reliable archival and biographical records describe her as a correspondent and friend within the circle of Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anna Seward, and related literary acquaintances.
She later married William Pennington, who was associated with the Bristol Hotwells as Master of Ceremonies. Much of her reputation now rests on her letters, especially the correspondence published as The Intimate Letters of Hester Piozzi and Penelope Pennington, 1788–1821, which preserves her voice and the texture of the world she inhabited.
Although not widely famous as a standalone author in the modern sense, she remains interesting to readers of diaries, letters, and women's writing because her papers capture the personal side of Georgian literary culture. She died in 1827.