Elizabeth Hamilton was both a writer and an organizer of social reform. Though she kept to fields of writing and activity then considered appropriate for a woman, her persistence and the variety of her work challenged the gender boundaries within reform. She was a leading woman reform writer in three ways. First, in the philanthropic activities of herself and the women depicted in her writings, she took up the reform role sketched out for women by predecessors and contemporaries such as Sarah Trimmer and Hannah More. Second, in her writings Hamilton subsumed the feminist critique of writers of the 1790s such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays. Finally, Hamilton took up the example set forth by Maria Edgeworth in her writing of women leading moral, social, and economic improvements at the local level, but with implications for the nation as a whole.

Hamilton was born on 25 July 1758 in...