The Review of English Studies Prize Essay: Identifying Mrs Meeke: Another Burney Family Novelist

Abstract

Recent scholarship suggests that the most prolific novelist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a certain ‘Mrs Meeke’, a Minerva Press author who produced 26 novels between 1795 and 1823, several of them presented pseudonymously or anonymously, as well as a series of translations and children’s books. Who was this writer? The present article reviews the evidence and unpicks a longstanding misidentification. It then makes the case for a new candidate, starting from an overlooked source, which gives the novelist’s full name as ‘Elizabeth Meeke’. It is argued here, with reference to a range of supporting evidence, that this was Elizabeth Meeke, nee Allen, a stepsister of Frances Burney. The final section discusses the implications of this discovery: by taking account of the personal history of Elizabeth Meeke, which can be reconstructed in some detail, it becomes possible properly to reinstate ‘Mrs Meeke’ and her works within the mechanisms and relationships of the literary market, and so to evaluate, for the first time, the full career interest of this most prolific novelist.