Hester Lynch Piozzi's fame and notoriety as a friend of Samuel Johnson have often obscured her own literary achievements and her considerable contemporary success in publishing. The trusted confidante and society hostess was also a versatile and productive writer. A mercurial and capricious character, full of charm and contradictions, she wrote poetry all through her life, leaving behind hundreds of verses in most of the major eighteenth-century modes, from pastoral and ode to satire and fable. But her poems tend to be derivative, while the nonfictional prose works for which she is best known show both scope and originality.

Hester Lynch Salusbury's associations with literature began in her earliest years. An only child, she later explained that "although Education was a Word then unknown, as applied to Females," her parents "taught me to read, & speak, & think, & translate from the French, till I was half a Prodigy." She was...