Elizabeth Hamilton (1756 or 1758 – 23 July 1816) was a Scottish essayist, poet, satirist and novelist, who in both her prose and fiction entered into the French-revolutionary era controversy in Britain over the education and rights of women. Early life She was most probably born on 25 July 1756, though the date is often given as 1758. She was born in Belfast, the third and youngest child of Charles Hamilton (d.1759), a Scottish merchant, and his wife Katherine Mackay (d.1767). In Belfast Hamilton's parents were on familiar terms with the town's prominent "New Light" Presbyterian families and with their Scottish Enlightenment social and political ideas. Her later thoughts on child education were greatly influenced by David Manson's co-educational English Grammar School, which her older sister Katherine attended with other children from this progressive milieu. Manson advertised the school's capacity to teach children to read and understand the English tongue "without the discipline of the rod by intermingling pleasurable and healthful exercise with their instruction". In 1762, after the death of her father, her mother sent Hamilton to live with her paternal aunt, Mrs Marshall who lived near Stirling. In 1772, she lived at Ingram's Crook near Bannockburn. Career Her first literary efforts were directed in supporting her brother Charles in his orientalist and linguistic studies. After his death in 1792 she continued to publish orientalist scholarship, as well as historical, educationalist and theoretical works. Hamilton maintained Belfast connections. She established a particularly close friendship with Martha McTier (sister of William Drennan, the founder of the United Irishmen), who pioneered schooling for poor girls. In 1793 she visited McTier in Belfast approving of her pedagogic efforts. "My little girls", boasted McTier, "do not gabble over the testament only, nor read with that difficulty which prevents pleasure in it... I keep up my number and four of them can read Fox and Pitt". In 1796 she published Translation of the Letters of the Hindoo Rajah. The two volume work in the tradition of Montesquieu and Goldsmith, follows the adventures in England of an Indian prince. His encounters with slave owners, capricious aristocrats, sceptical philosophers and belligerent women leads to his progressive disillusionment with the host culture. In 1800 Hamilton produced Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. The novel was a response to the Revolution Controversy of the 1790s, a discussion of “revolutionary ideas about a broader franchise, primogeniture, meritocracy, marriage and divorce”. Conservative