Elizabeth Benger

Elizabeth Benger (1775-1827) gained considerable notoriety for her early publication, The Female Geniad (1791), composed when she was thirteen; in that poem she praises Mary Steele’s poem, Danebury. In the early years of the first decade of the 19th century she became friends with Eliza Fenwick, Mary Reid, Jane Tobin, and Mary Hays, moving within the Godwin circle as well. Her name was often spelled at the time by her friends by its sound (Benjer).  She was an abolitionist, publishing a poem, The Abolition of the Slave Trade, in 1809.