join the household of Queen Charlotte. Knight was with the Queen as the King's mental capacity declined and a Regency was established. In 1812 she became Companion to Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales, holding this post until the Regent fired her in 1814 for imagined lapses of judgement. In 1818 she became a teacher of English, literature, science and fine arts to the young Massimo Taparelli, the Marquis d'Azeglio, who was an important Italian writer, painter, patriot and politic. He mentioned Cornelia in his d'Azeglio's Memoirs (1867), in chapter XIV where d'Azeglio met Knight in 1818 at Castelgandolfo. The last twenty years of her life were spent outside England, and she died in Paris. Works Knight published five works in her lifetime: Dinarbas (1790), a continuation of Samuel Johnson's Rasselas Marcus Flaminius: a view of the military, political, and social life of the Romans in a series of letters from a patrician to his friend (1792), a romantic epistolary novel set in ancient Rome during the reign of the emperor Tiberius. A Description of Latium, or La Campagna di Roma (1805), with her own etchings Translations from the German in Prose and Verse (1812) Sir Guy de Lusignan, a Romance (1833) At her death she left behind an incomplete autobiography and a journal. Her autobiography is a most valuable source of information for the court history of those days. The most important statements in the work were edited and published posthumously in 1861. Notes References Uses Cornelia as her first name. Further reading Roger Fulford, ed., The Autobiography of Miss Knight, Lady Companion to Princess Charlotte (1960) Barbara Luttrell, The Prim Romantic: A biography of Ellis Cornelia Knight, 1758-1837 (1965) External links Frogmore Lodge press where Ellis Cornelia Knight taught and produced books for Princess Charlotte Autobiography of Miss Cornelia Knight (extract) 1757 births 1837 deaths 18th-century English novelists 19th-century English novelists English translators English autobiographers 19th-century British translators