Elizabeth Hitchener

Elizabeth Hitchener sometimes called Portia or Bessy, was a British schoolmistress and poet. Her reputation was ruined after a short, intense and platonic friendship with Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Life Hitchener's home parish was Keymer and she was baptised in April 1783.

She and the teenage Shelley were intrigued by each other and over a year they exchanged about ninety letters and many of these survive. John Pilfold and his wife had joined Hitchener's father in advising against this as it would damage her reputation. She decided to just make a short visit as she intended to return quickly to her school.

Hitchener was not treated well. Shelley decided that her name was Portia and then Bessie and he and his crowd came to dislike Hitchener. The stay ended suddenly and for an unknown reason and Hitchener left and decided to go back to teaching at Hurstpierpoint. However her reputation was damaged and she could not find any pupils.

Hitchener is possibly the basis of Miss Celinda Toobad, a character in Thomas Love Peacock's 1818 novella Nightmare Abbey.

The journalist Henry James Slack lent William Michael Rossetti some of Shelley's letters to Hitchener. Slack said that the letters had come into his possession from the solicitor and executor of Hitchener's estate. Slack told Thomas James Wise, who saw the letters, was that Hitchener had gone abroad, and married an Austrian officer. (There is no basis for this). Wise published the letters without authority. The letters had been deposited with Slack, on conditions that are unclear, Slack did not claim he owned them. The original letters passed as a legacy to Charles Hargrove who gave them to the British Museum in 1907, and then to the British Library.