Frances Brooke, novelist, dramatist, essayist, translator, and poet, is best remembered today for her fiction, especially for the first Canadian novel, The History of Emily Montague (1769), written during her years in Quebec when her husband was military chaplain to the British garrison there. Her highly successful comic opera, Rosina (1783), first produced at London's Covent Garden on 3 December 1782, appears often in anthologies of eighteenth-century drama.

She was baptized Frances Moore on 24 January 1724 at Claypole, England, where her father, Rev. Thomas Moore, was curate. On his death in 1727 Frances moved with her mother and two younger sisters to the home of Mrs. Moore's mother. Ten years later, after their mother's death, the daughters went to live with their mother's sister, Sarah, and her husband, Rev. Roger Steevens, at the rectory of Tydd St. Mary. By the 1750s Frances was writing poetry and plays in London, and by the summer of...