Elizabeth Meeke

Elizabeth Meeke (née Allen; 13 November 1761 – c. October 1826) was a prolific English author, translator and children's writer, and the stepsister of Frances Burney. She wrote about 30 novels, published by the Minerva Press in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Biography Elizabeth Allen was baptised at St Margaret's Church, King's Lynn. She was the youngest daughter of Stephen and Elizabeth "Eliza". After her father's death, her mother remarried Charles Burney in 1767.

Identity The novels appeared mainly under the name Mrs. Meeke, sometimes under the pseudonym Gabrielli, and a few anonymously. Their author was once assumed to be Mary Meeke, the wife of a Staffordshire vicar, but "Mrs. Meeke" was conclusively identified as Elizabeth Meeke in an article by Simon Macdonald in 2013. She is thought to have died in about October 1826.

Fiction Meeke's debut novel was Count St Blanchard in 1795. Others include The Abbey of Clugny, The Mysterious Wife, Anecdotes of the Altamont Family and Which is the Man? Her works include several translations from French, such as Elizabeth, or the Exiles of Siberia.

The third edition of Chamber's Cyclopaedia of English Literature in 1903 disparaged her work:

Current evaluations are not so dismissive. Anthony Mandai describes Meeke as "the most prolific novelist of the age," and argues for her complicated, yet central, role as a professional author through the watershed decades during which she wrote.