Sophia Lee
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Sophia Lee (1750 – 13 March 1824) was an English novelist, dramatist and educator. She was a formative writer of Gothic fiction. She and her sister Harriet also wrote a number of Canterbury Tales (1797).
Life and literary production
She was the daughter of John Lee (died 1781), actor and theatrical manager, and was born in London. Her first piece, The Chapter of Accidents, a three-act drama based on Denis Diderot's Le père de famille, was produced by George Colman the Elder at the Haymarket Theatre on 5 August 1780 and was an immediate success.Template:Sfn
When her father died in 1781, Lee spent the proceeds of the play on establishing a school at Bath, where she made a home for her sisters Anne and Harriet. Her novel The Recess, or a Tale of other Times (1783–1785) was a historical romance. The Recess, set in Elizabethan times, revolves around two fictional daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots.<ref>Siobhan Carroll, An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750-1850. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015 (pp.162-6).</ref> Lee also wrote the play Almeyda, Queen of Granada (1796) was a long tragedy in blank verse, which opened at Drury Lane on 20 April 1796 but ran for only five nights.
