The Writers Harriet de Boinville Influenced
This first-ever biography of Harriet de Boinville explores her close relationships with Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and other leading writers of the Romantic era, but also tells the gripping story of Harriet’s early years as the wife of an aristocratic military officer during the French-English Wars, when she experienced a naval attack in the Caribbean, a shipwreck off the coast of France, and detention as a suspected spy in Dunkirk.
At the Center of the Circle: Harriet de Boinville (1773–1847) and the Writers She Influenced During Europe's Revolutionary Era (New Academia 2023) presents the life of an extraordinary woman who befriended - in addition to the Shelleys - Frances Burney, William Godwin, and Giovanni Ruffini, an Italian novelist published in Britain.
Respected scholars of British Romanticism have praised the biography. For example, Charlotte Gordon, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, writes: "A vital player in Revolutionary circles, Harriet de Boinville has long been overlooked by historians and scholars. This new biography offers an important role model for today's reader, a fearless woman almost lost to the fog of history."