Notes

1 A somewhat different version of this paper was delivered with the subtitle “Seven Steps to Literary Obscurity” at the Wild Irish Girls conference held at the Chawton House Research Center in July of 2006.

2 For a brief biographical overview, see my article “Melesina Chenevix St. George Trench.” The Female Spectator 10.2 (Summer 2006): 4-6. Print.

3 This unpublished manuscript is currently housed in the Hampshire Record Office in Winchester. It is listed as MS 23M93/13. For a full description of the text and its significance see my article, "A Long-Forgotten Sorrow: The Mourning Journal of Melesina Trench." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 21:1 (Fall 2008): 153-77. Print.

4 When it became clear that their half-brother, Charles Manners St. George, would not father any children, the three surviving Trench sons (Francis, Richard and Phillip) took the name “Chenevix Trench” as they were expected to inherit the Chenevix properties.

5 In referring to the writings and opinions of Melesina Trench before 1803, I will continue to refer to her as “Trench,” although she was actually still Mrs. St. George at this time. I feel justified in doing this since the writing was published under the name of “the late Mrs. Richard Trench,” and because it is simply less confusing to use a consistent surname.

6 Unless otherwise specified, all references to Trench’s travel journals refer to the typescript prepared by her descendent, Arthur Richard Austen-Leigh in the early twentieth century. Although Austen-Leigh sometimes alters chronology in the service of narrative flow, his transcriptions are as scrupulously accurate as it is possible to be, given the physical challenges of the actual journals. His typescript can be found in the Hampshire Record office, listed as MS 23/M93/3/1-17.

7 According to Milnes, “it was only upon the subsequent marriage of Mrs. St. George to Mr. Trench, that the Duke returned her letters and her portrait by the hands of Lady Carysfort, intimating with great delicacy that he thought he had no longer the right to keep them”(124). These letters (and his to her) are lost.