SOURCE: "Portrait of a Georgian Lady: The Letters of Hester Lynch (Thrale) Piozzi, 1784-1821," in Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, Vol. 60, No. 2, Spring, 1978, pp. 304-30.

In the following excerpt, the critics present a portrait of Piozzi's character based on her letters and diaries.

Often too quick to take offence, Mrs. Piozzi never suffered from an excess of humility. Even in admitting mistaken judgements, she rarely denigrated herself. At the same time that she wrote her letters, she appraised their worth as literary and historical documents, as testimonials of an unrewarded virtue, that cried out—she assumed—for preservation and publication. Writing to John Salusbury on 17 March 1811, she optimistically prophesies, "When the black, deep, dividing Gulph is pass'd by your poor Aunt, you will consider these Pages as her Shadows; and prize them accordingly not for their Wit, because the Head that has nothing better than Wit...