ELEANOR SLEATH

A famous gothic, romantic novelist whose most renowned novel 'the Orphan of the Rhine' was published in 1798. She was well known to Jane Austen who was not a fan of her or her fellow gothic novelist's work. In her 'Northanger Abbey' (1817), a parody of the gothic novel genre and craze, she called their books "horrid novels".

Eleanor Carter was born in Leicester, part of the illustrious Carter family of the Newarke. She was the youngest child of five to Thomas Carter, a country lawyer and her mother Elizabeth. Little is known of her upbringing. She married a surgeon working in the Leicester Militia, Joseph Barnabas Sleath in 1792 and settled in Nuneaton. Joseph and their infant son, also Joseph, both died within a month of each other in 1798. Eleanor was taken back into the family fold. The family moved out to Scraptoft Hall where she befriended a local vicar, John Dudley of Humberstone. They were part of a literary group which included Susanna Watts, the compiler of Leicester's first guide book. Scandalous gossip relating to Eleanor and Dudley's relationship forced Dudley and his wife Ann to leave Humberstone and reside in Sileby, another one of his parishes. However this to to little avail, and the Dudley's formally separated in 1811.

After the death of her brother John and mother in 1813, Eleanor moved to Loughborough, having purchased the former home of industrialist John Heathcote. Ann Dudley died in 1823. John Dudley and Eleanor Sleath were married on 1 April 1823 and settled in Sileby. Eleanor died of liver disease on 5 May 1847.

A list of her works:
- The Orphan of the Rhine, 1798
- Who's the Murderer?, 1802
- The Bristol Heiress; or the Errors of Education, 1809
- The Nocturnal Minstrel; or the Spirit of the Woods, 1810
- Pyrenean Banditti, 1811
- Glenowen; or The Fairy Palace; 1812

Further Reading:
Czlapinski, Rebecca; Wheeler, Eric C. (2011). "The Real Eleanor Sleath" . Studies in Gothic Fiction. 2: 5–12.