She was an author born in Norwich, England, to Amelia Briggs and the physician James Alderson. Very interested in the politics of the time, her cousin was the lawyer Edward Hall Alderson who would become Baron of the Exchequer and said to have helped shape “the British capitalism of the Victorian era”, and she would correspond with him regularly for much of her life.
Showing much interest in writing, she wrote The Dangers of Coquetry when she was 18 in 1797. In 1798 she married the artist John Opie, who encouraged her and three years later her novel Father and Daughter was published, followed the next year by Adeline Mowbray. Her husband died in 1807 but her publications would continue and between 1806 and 1822 she could be read in books such as Simple Tales, Valentine’s Eve and Madeline.
Splitting her time between Norwich and London, she counted Sir Walter Scott and William Godwin among her friends, published Detraction Displayed, joined The Society of Friends, and after changing the direction of what she wanted to do in the mid 1820s she virtually stopped writing to concentrate on charity work and travelling.
While on her travels she made a visit to Cromer in her home county of Norfolk she caught a chill. This caused her to retire and spend the rest of her life at home in Norwich, where she died a year later in 1853 aged 84. She left behind her many novels and stories, two biographies, numerous poems and the first transcription from Welsh to English of the carol “All Through the Night”.
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