from nursing her sister Mary, who had died of the same disease in 1720, as had their mother before her; some accused Swift of inadvertently causing her death. Her father had left her well provided for, but she was burdened by debts accumulated by her mother and her spendthrift brother Bartholomew. In her will, she named the barrister Robert Marshall and George Berkeley, the celebrated philosopher and future Bishop of Cloyne, executors and joint residuary legatees of her estate, although she knew neither man well. Due to the debts, a protracted lawsuit ensued and a large part of the estate was lost in legal costs. It was widely reported that she had made it a condition of the inheritance that her executors publish all her correspondence with Swift, but in fact, no such stipulation seems to have been made. Swift, whose letters to her were published after her death, is not mentioned in her will, perhaps a final retaliation against a man whose neglect made her "live a life like a languishing death". Legacy A ward in St Patrick's University Hospital is named “Vanessa” in her honour. Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais painted a fancy portrait of her in 1868, over 100 years after her death: Vanessa. The painting depicts Esther holding a letter, presumably written to or from Swift. The portrait is an imagined likeness: no contemporary portrait of Esther is known to survive and there are only a few rather vague descriptions of her appearance. Margaret Louisa Woods wrote a novel inspired by her life titled Esther Vanhomrigh (1891). Elizabeth Myers, wife of Littleton C. Powys, who was a brother of John Cowper Powys, wrote a novel titled The Basilisk of St. James, (London, 1945, Chapman and Hall), which has as its protagonist Jonathan Swift. Central to the plot is the personal conflict that arose from Swift's relationships with both Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa) and Esther Johnson, nicknamed Stella by Swift. In the 1994 film Words Upon the Window Pane, based on the play by William Butler Yeats, she is played by Orla Brady: the plot turns on a seance in Dublin in the 1920s where the ghosts of Swift, Stella and Vanessa appear to resume their 200-year-old quarrel. References Sources Evelyn Hardy, The Conjured Spirit, Swift: A Study in the Relationship of Swift, Stella, and Vanessa, 1949 Sir Walter Scott, Life of Jonathan Swift, 1829 External links 1680s