Penelope Aubin (c. 1679 – 1738?)[1] was an English novelist, poet, and translator. She published seven novels between 1721 and 1728. Aubin published poetry in 1707 and turned to novels in 1721; she translated French works in the 1720s, spoke publicly on moral and political issues at her Lady's Oratory in 1729,[2] and wrote a play in 1730. Aubin died in April 1738, survived by her husband until his death in April 1740. After the author's death, her works were gathered and published as A Collection of Entertaining Histories and Novels, Designed to Promote the Cause of Virtue and Honor. Aubin's works have a long history after her death, being both plagiarised and published transatlantically. She is one of a number of eighteenth-century women writers whose works and biography is being more rigorously explored by modern scholars.

Early life

Penelope Aubin née Charleton's exact birth date remains unknown; she was the illegitimate daughter of Sir Richard Temple of Stowe and most likely born in London around 1679.[3] While scholars in the past had theorized from the 'evidence' of her novels that she was both Catholic and Huguenot, more recently her biographers, Debbie Welham and Joel H. Baer, have identified that her husband's family were from Jersey in the Channel Islands with Huguenot links, her Charleton roots were English and staunchly Anglican.[4] She was the daughter of Sir Richard Temple and Anne Charleton. Her mother Anne was the daughter of the physician and natural philosopher Walter Charleton. Aubin married her husband, Abraham Aubin, without the permission of either set of parents in 1696, and they had three children: Marie, Abraham, and Penelope, none outlived their parents. Aubin managed the family business while her husband, a merchant, fought in Queen Anne's wars (he gives a description of his military career in Aubin's obituary in 1738). Aubin was asked to be involved with a scheme by former pirate John Breholt to raise a petition in support of the repatriation of the pirates of Madagascar (and their wealth) to England; she declined to do so and her 1709 testimony to the Board of Trade enquiry regarding Breholt's character helped discredit Breholt's plans.[5]

Works

Title page for The Strange Adventures of the Count de Vinevil

Further reading

References

  1. ^ Aubin's obituary was placed by her husband and published in the Daily Post on Friday 5 May 1738. She was Interred at St George's Southwark just over a week before the obituary appeared. Aubin's date of death has long been erroneously shown as 1731 as this was the date suggested in a possibly satirical piece written at the time by Prevost claiming she was dead (and ugly). The Orlando Project lists 1739 as Aubin's date of death, the Oxford English Dictionary site suggests that Aubin died much earlier in 1731. See http://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/main/content/view/394/440/ Archived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ Debbie Welham 'The Lady and the Old Woman: Mrs Midnight the Orator and Her Political Provence' in Min Wild and Noel Chevalier, Reading Christopher Smart in the Twenty-First Century; Bucknell University Press (2013)
  3. ^ Debbie Welham, The Particular Case of Penelope Aubin, Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, Volume 31, Number 1 (March 2008), pp. 63-76
  4. ^ Joel H Baer and Debbie Welham, 'Aubin Penelope', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
  5. ^ Troost, Linda (2001). Eighteenth century women (Vol.1 ed.). Norwalk, CT: AMS Press. ISBN 9780404647018. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  6. ^ Performed in 1730 and first known publication in London in 1732 there are two further editions in 1733 and 1734

External links

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