Elizabeth Griffith: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Source: Eger, Elizabeth. ‘Griffith, Elizabeth (1727–1793)’, Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography. 2 July 2008. <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11596>
Griffith, Elizabeth (1727–1793), playwright and writer, was born on 11 October 1727 in
Glamorgan, Wales, to Thomas Griffith (1680–1744), actor–manager of the Smock Alley
Theatre, Dublin, and his wife, Jane (1694–1773), daughter of Richard Foxcroft, rector of
St Michael's, Portarlington, Queen's county, Ireland. Thomas Griffith's immediate family
was Welsh and Jane Foxcroft's from Yorkshire, but they settled in Dublin, where they
brought up Elizabeth to be a sociable child, cheerful and at ease among the theatrical
community. Thomas Griffith was a doting father and took great care to ensure that his
daughter was well-read in all the polite new publications in English and French, teaching
her to recite poetry and plays from memory at an early age. His death in 1744, when
Elizabeth was only seventeen, left the family in financial difficulty. Elizabeth may have
tried her luck on the provincial stage at this point. Her Dublin début took place on 13
October 1749, when she played Juliet to Thomas Sheridan's ageing Romeo at the Smock
Alley Theatre. She specialized in tragic roles, including Jane Shore and Cordelia in King
Lear.
In 1746 Elizabeth Griffith had met the captivating Richard Griffith (d. 1788), a Kilkenny
farmer unrelated to her, who had aristocratic connections but no money. His father had
made all his fortune through a prudent marriage and refused to grant his son a living in
the hope that he would follow suit. Richard was therefore in no position to propose to
Elizabeth, struggling to support himself. While he made several attempts to seduce her,
she remained resolute in resisting his physical charms. The couple did, however, indulge
in a flirtatious and spirited correspondence in which they combined rational discussion of
their reading with lavish displays of sensibility. Both correspondents lacked a formal
education, which perhaps made them appreciate their intimate and improving literary
exchange all the more. The delicate and earnest solicitude of these letters is particularly
poignant in the light of their authors' own precarious social situation. By 1751, five years
into their courtship, Elizabeth prepared to move to London in an effort to bring it to a
close, realizing that any shared future would be financially perilous. At this point Richard
proposed to her and they were secretly married on 12 May.
Elizabeth's decision to accept Richard's offer of marriage was to plague her all her life—
she felt responsible for their inevitable poverty and was spurred to pursue a literary career
for profit. Richard Griffith tried to raise a suitable living by investing a great deal of
borrowed money in a linen manufactory on his farm. He remained unable to reveal his
marriage to his father, who had financial control over a lawsuit in which Richard's
financial hopes resided. Meanwhile Elizabeth lived with her aunt in Dublin. It has been
discovered by the scholar Betty Rizzo (see Rizzo, Elizabeth Griffith) that it was probably
during the early months of 1752 that Elizabeth, alone and pregnant, wrote her first play,
Theodorick, King of Denmark. This tragedy was published by James Esdall of Dublin
with a subscription list of almost 500 names that reflect the wide social circle in which
the Griffiths moved. Theodorick is adapted from Eustache Le Noble de Tennelière's
novel Histoire d'Ildegarte, reine de Danemark et de Norwege, ou, L'amour magnanime.
Tellingly, Griffith chose to focus on the heroine's inferior birth and lack of fortune rather
than her Amazonian powers. The play was never produced, but probably raised £25 in
subscriptions. In June Elizabeth gave birth to a son, also called Richard Griffith (1752–
1820). In the following year, while her husband still struggled with his business,
Elizabeth decided to move to London to earn a living. She joined the Covent Garden
theatre company in March 1753, never to progress beyond playing minor characters,
perhaps because of her formal training under Thomas Sheridan, whose acting style was
thought to be stiff and old-fashioned by contemporary London audiences. In 1755 she
became pregnant with a second child and was forced to quit the stage. A daughter,
Catherine, was born in 1756, a year which saw the collapse of Richard's linen
manufactory.
It was at this point of financial desperation that the Griffiths decided to publish their
courtship letters under fictional names. A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and
Frances appeared in 1757, causing an immediate literary sensation. As a model example
of sentimental romance blended with witty exchange and moral bite, the letters
established the fame but not the fortune of their authors. The Griffiths never made
enough money from their epistolary courtship to support themselves, despite the fact that
the Letters passed through several editions and was positively reviewed. In 1769 they
published a follow-up, Two Novels in Letters by the Authors of Henry and Frances (The
Delicate Distress by ‘Frances’ and The Gordian Knot by ‘Henry’), in which they included
prefaces under their pen-names, extending their unusual literary conceit whereby the
boundaries between fact and fiction were blurred. While other novelists had aimed to
deceive their readers as to the authenticity of their epistolary fictions, few had used real
letters to weave a sentimental narrative. Later editions of the Letters between Henry and
Frances added new letters to the original collection, including one in which Frances
laments the fact that she must be a professional writer: ‘I never was designed for an
Author, and feel no Pride in my Fame—therefore nought but Profit shapes my Quill’
(letter 616, 1786, vol. 5, p. 124).
Between 1759 and 1761 Elizabeth Griffith spent a period in Ireland as companion to the
wife of a wealthy cousin of her husband, Patrick Wemys of Danesfort, Kilkenny. Richard
Griffith, still dodging the bailiffs, carried out electoral and paralegal business for his
cousin while Elizabeth did her best to continue writing. She worked on translations from
French: The Memoirs of Ninon d'Enclos (1761) and Marmontel's Contes moraux
(probably contributing to the first volume of an anonymous version entitled Moral Tales,
published in November 1763). On the death of their cousin in January 1761 the Griffiths
settled in Dublin. However, they soon decided to move to London in order to pursue their
literary careers in earnest.
Elizabeth Griffith saw herself foremost as a playwright. When she arrived in London in
1764, having left the children with her mother in Portarlington, she brought two plays
with her: Amana, a tragedy adapted from a tale by John Hawkesworth in The Adventurer
(nos. 72–3) and The Platonic Wife, a version of one of Marmontel's tales. Amana was
published by subscription by W. Johnston but failed to make the stage. The Platonic Wife,
Griffith's first comedy, was taken immediately for production on the stage at Drury Lane,
where it was premièred on 24 January 1765. The heroine of the play was modelled on
Frances in the Letters, a learned and witty woman who insists that her husband treat her
with tenderness and politeness after their marriage. When he refuses, she leaves him, and
while separated entertains (but rejects) the propositions of two lovers. She repents and
returns to a husband who is similarly remorseful and treats her with all the civility she
desires. While Griffith's writing is spritely and shows a sure sense of dramatic pace,
critical reactions were extremely harsh. The London theatrical establishment resented the
audacity of a woman playwright's claims for respect and admiration. If Griffith was to be
able to support her children as a playwright, she would have to conform to contemporary
sexual stereotypes rather than challenge the orthodoxy.
Readers can detect a significant change of tone in Griffith's subsequent four plays, in
which she abandoned her concern for improving the status of intelligent women and
created a host of female characters who are the passive and long-suffering companions of
errant and often violent men. Griffith was influenced by the success of domestic comedy
in France, a new genre defined by Diderot in his essay De la poésie dramatique (1758) as
the sort of comedy that should arouse sensibility rather than laughter. Griffith's The
Double Mistake (1766) was a great triumph, playing twelve performances and concluding
with a royal command performance. Griffith's success inspired her to approach the most
powerful man of the London theatre world, David Garrick, actor–manager of Drury Lane.
She began a correspondence with him which lasted for twelve years and in which she
made unremitting pleas for his support. At first she failed to produce a play that satisfied
Garrick, who disliked sentimental comedy but could see its potential for making him a
profit. In March 1768 Griffith asked to see his copy of Beaumarchais's Eugénie (1767), a
successful comedy by Diderot's younger disciple. With Garrick's help and supervision,
Griffith transformed this sparkling work into The School for Rakes (1769). The play was
extremely popular and earned Elizabeth enough money to kit out her son for entry into
the East India Company.
Elizabeth Griffith's final two plays, A Wife in the Right (1772) and The Times (1779,
based on Goldoni's Il burburo benefico), were both domestic and sentimental comedies.
A Wife in the Right was a failure owing to the mismanagement of George Colman,
theatrical director at Covent Garden, and the drunkenness of the actor Ned Shuter, who
failed to learn his lines. The Times, a moralistic warning against the dangers of gambling,
was a moderate success, running for nine performances. Critics were lukewarm in their
praise, objecting to Griffith's use of satire as unbecoming for a woman. While Griffith
managed to become a professional playwright by manipulating contemporary opinion
rather than allowing herself to be its victim, she was never entirely free from others'
sexist prejudice against her work.
Griffith undoubtedly believed that literature was a useful moral tool. Her dramatic works
reveal a didactic streak that she pursued in other genres. Her epistolary novels, The
Delicate Distress (1769), The History of Lady Barton (1771), and The Story of Lady
Juliana Harley (1776), can be seen to extend the themes of her earlier courtship letters but
develop a greater psychological insight into female suffering. In all three of these
complex yet artful plots, Griffith's heroines are shown to be morally superior after
enduring unreasonable amounts of mental and physical torment. In the preface to The
History of Lady Barton, Griffith confesses to having drawn her characters from ‘the
living drama’ rather than the ‘mimic scene’, having had ‘a good deal of acquaintance
with the world’ (p. x). She declares she will be happy if she can ‘contribute towards
forming, or informing, the young and innocent’ (p. xi). Griffith was interested in her
female predecessors in this genre, editing A Collection of Novels (1777) by Aphra Behn,
Penelope Aubin, and Eliza Haywood. Here she argues that ‘good Romances’ are ‘silent
Instructors’, more capable of moral instruction than ‘the most able philosophers’ (p. 4,
editor's preface). This was an unusual attempt to reassess novelists who were at that time
synonymous with sexual immorality.
Griffith also wrote an ambitious work of dramatic criticism, The Morals of Shakespeare's
Drama Illustrated (1775), dedicated to David Garrick, and citing Elizabeth Montagu's
work as inspirational (she was also the translator of A Letter from Monsieur Desefans to
Mrs Montagu (1777)). ‘Shakespeare is not only my Poet, but my Philosopher also’ (p. ix),
declared Griffith, extending Johnson's concern with Shakespeare's ‘purely ethic morals’
to highlight his ‘general economy of life … domestic ties, offices and obligations’ (p.
xiii), and showing particular interest in his heroines. Griffith's most overtly instructive
work was her Essays for Young Married Women (1782), in which she modelled herself
on Hester Chapone and Hannah More in presenting good principles and domestic advice
to young women.
One of Griffith's most intriguing publications is a collection of short stories, Novellettes,
selected for the use of young ladies and gentlemen, written by Dr Goldsmith, Mrs
Griffith … (1780). The first edition, held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, includes an
impressive frontispiece of Griffith, surrounded by her works and in the pose of a
confident, even proud author. Fourteen of the seventeen tales are by Griffith and the
preface, written by herself, contains a glowing account of her success as an instructor of
the young and, moreover, an example to her sex:
Mrs. GRIFFITH, the ornament and pride of her country, has strove to open the flood-gate
of Literature to her own Sex, and purifying the stream from the filth with which it was
impregnated to make it guide [sic] with meandering invitation through the vallies of
Britain. She is one of the many examples in the present day, that have served to explode
the illiberal assertion that Female genius is inferior to Male. (preface, ii–iii)
While Griffith was forced to underplay, and perhaps ultimately relinquish, her ‘feminist’
politics, she was inevitably aware of her considerable achievement as a professional
woman author. She had a passionate concern for the workings of her trade, resenting the
power of circulating libraries, ‘slop-shops in literature’, which made available works of
varied quality without paying for the privilege. Both her persistent lobbying of David
Garrick for support, and the large body of translation work she undertook throughout her
life, suggest that she was a hard-bitten professional author. Elizabeth Griffith spent the
last decade of her life free of the obligation to support her family, surely a relief for
someone who had laboured under the weight of financial pressures for so much of her life.
Griffith's son Richard Griffith had a successful career in the East India Company, before
returning to England in 1780 an extremely wealthy man. After forming a suitable
marriage he took his elderly parents back to Dublin in 1782. ‘Henry’ and ‘Frances’ ended
their days peacefully on their son's estate in co. Kildare, Millicent, Ireland. Richard
Griffith senior died on 11 February 1788. Elizabeth Griffith died at Kildare on 5 January
1793.
Elizabeth Eger