Hester Thrale

Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi was a Welsh writer and socialite whose diaries, letters and other works made her an important source of information on Samuel Johnson and 18th-century British life. A member of the prominent Salusbury family of Anglo-Welsh landowners, she first married a wealthy English brewer, Henry Thrale, with whom she had 12 children, and then a musician, Gabriel Mario Piozzi. Her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786) and her diary Thraliana, published posthumously in 1942, are the main works for which she is remembered. She also wrote a popular history book, a travel book, and a dictionary, and she was an innovator in the art of annotation. She has been seen as a protofeminist.