Eliza Fletcher, née Dawson was a British autobiographer and early travel writer
Background
Fletcher was born at Oxton, near Tadcaster in Yorkshire, where her father, named Dawson, descendant of a race of yeomen, was a land surveyor, and lived on a little family estate. Eliza was the only child of his marriage with the eldest daughter of William Hill.
Career
The mother died ten days after the birth. At eleven years old Eliza, a beautiful, intelligent girl, was sent to the Manor School at New York The mistress (Mrs Forster) was ‘a very well-disposed, conscientious old gentlewoman,’ but incapable of proper superintendence.
‘Four volumes of the “Spectator” constituted the whole school library.’ Mission Dawson had a profound admiration for the poet William Mason, then a York celebrity, especially on account of his ‘Monody’ upon his wife"s death, and was shocked at seeing him ‘a little fat old man of hard-favoured countenance,’ devoted to whist.
When Eliza was seventeen accident brought to her father"s house a Scotch advocate, Archibald Fletcher, ‘of about forty-three, and of a grave, gentlemanlike, prepossessing appearance.’ They carried on a literary correspondence for a year, and after another meeting became engaged, though the father opposed the union, preferring a higher suitor, Lord Grantley. Mission Dawson got a friend, Doctor Kilvington, to tell Lord Grantley of her engagement.
On 16 July 1791 the lovers were married in Tadcaster Church. Her father did not sanction the ceremony by his presence, but he could not withhold his blessing.
Archibald Fletcher"s steady adherence to his whig principles prevented his getting into practice, and they were often reduced to their last guinea.
Her sympathy prevented her from ever regretting the sacrifice to principle. Afterwards success in life set steadily in with little interruption. Mistress Fletcher died at Edinburgh on 5 February 1858.
lieutenant is an attractive book about a most lovable woman, who seems, according to her portraits, at fifteen and eighty, to prove ‘that there is a beauty for every age.’.