Eliza Rennie
| Eliza Rennie/ Mrs. Eliza Walker | |
|---|---|
| Born | 17 May 1813 Aberdeen, Scotland |
| Died | unknown, but after 1869 |
| Occupation | Author |
| Notable works | Traits of Character |
Eliza Rennie or Mrs. Eliza Walker is a published author, though her biography remains somewhat of a mystery. She was possibly born 17 May 1813, although this is uncertain and unproven. Her death date was sometime after 30 Mar 1869, when she was awarded £25 by the Royal Literary Fund,. Eliza was a minor Scottish-born romantic/gothic short story author, who spent most of her adult life in London, and published an autobiographical two-volume work of literary gossip Traits of Character: being Twenty-Five Years' Literary and Personal Recollections, by a Contemporary. She was most notable for writing about her friendship with Mary Shelley and her contemporaries, including meetings with such celebrities as the Duke of Wellington.
Mary Shelley's biographer, Emily W. Sunstein claims that Eliza was born to the famous engineering family Rennie, but this seems improbable and no corroborating evidence has been found. However, Sunstein's claim that "the literary Lord Dillon Henry Dillon, 13th Viscount Dillon, (one of the early patrons about whom Eliza wrote extensively in 'Traits of Character) was said to be Eliza's lover" is intriguing.
Eliza's first definite published work was her "Poems", published in 1828, when she was still a teenager aged possibly 13 or 14. This juvenile work received mixed reviews, but it was sufficiently promising to enable her to gain access to literary salons and the company and friendship of some leading authors and characters of the day.
It has proven difficult to trace her ancestry and parentage as no contemporary accounts have yet been found, and the following biography is tentative and incomplete as it has been deduced from a comparison of published local and family histories, clues left by Eliza in her own writings, (which are not always wholly reliable, according to Geraldine Friedman) and an as-yet unverified process of deduction from a search of various parish records and census data.
Her father was almost certainly Dr. Alexander Home Stirling Rennie, born on (13 June 1797 in Kilsyth, Scotland, a distinguished physician who later studied at Marischal College, Aberdeen. Her grandfather is therefore assumed to be Revd Robert Rennie of Kilsyth, b (1762 – d 1820), a Church of Scotland Minister and agricultural expert who was the author of treatises on peat moss, and a contributor to the Statistical Accounts of Scotland. The family was sufficiently distinguished to be the subject of a page or two of Rev Anton's "History of Kilsyth" (publication ref needed)
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