Esther Lewis (poet)

Esther Lewis (1716–1794) was an English poet who published in the fashionable Bath Journal and occasionally in the Gentleman's Magazine. She is also known by her pen name of Sylvia and her later married name of Esther Clark.[1]

Biography

Esther Lewis was the daughter of a clergyman, John Lewis of Holt, Wiltshire.[2] She had a mentor in Samuel Bowden, a physician who treated her through a smallpox infection, also a poet, who was impressed by her talent. Bowden regularly published his own poetry in the Bath Journal and encouraged her to write and publish poems there too. He praised her in a poem of his own entitled To a Young Lady of Holt on her most Ingenious Poems (1749).[2][3]

Lewis was unmarried when her father made a will on 24 September 1760. In that, he left her £600 (equivalent to £104,752 in 2025) and appointed her as sole executrix of his will, leaving other bequests to four grand-children. He died on 28 October 1761.[4]

Soon after the death of her father, Lewis married Robert Clark of Tetbury and moved there.[2]

Her best known poem is Advice to a Young Lady Lately Married (1752). Her works were popular and reprinted over the subsequent decades. She arranged a collection of her own works at the prompting of her husband, which were published for charity in 1789, as Poems Moral and Entertaining. This contains a letter to an anonymous lady in London who is thought to be Sarah Fielding, sister of Henry Fielding, whom she had befriended at Bath around 1758.[2][3]

She died at Tetbury in 1794 and is buried there.[3]

References

  1. ↑ Esther Lewis Clark in The Cambridge Companion to Women's Writing in Britain, 1660–1789, Cambridge Companions to Literature, Catherine Ingrassia ED, Cambridge University Press, (2015), pages xiv and 5 ISBN 131629823X
  2. 1 2 3 4 Ester Clark in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Eighteenth-Century Writers and Writing 1660 - 1789 Paul Baines, Julian Ferraro, Pat Rogers, page 67, pub John Wiley & Sons, 2010 ISBN 1444390082
  3. 1 2 3 Lonsdale, Roger (ed) (1990). Esther Lewis in Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology. Oxford University Press. page 225. ISBN 0192827758.
  4. ↑ PROB 11/870/436; Will of John Lewis and codicil, Ancestry.com, accessed 17 August 2026 (subscription required)
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