Charlotte Anne Eaton

Eaton, Charlotte Anne née Waldie, 1788—1859

by Benjamin Colbert

Charlotte Anne Waldie Eaton was the daughter of George Waldie, a Quaker banker of Hendersyde Park, Roxburghshire, and Ann Waldie, née Ormston.

Her early attempt to write a Gothic novel, 'Home and Abroad', characteristically invoked the cross-cultural themes of the genre. This was abandoned, however, only to be taken up again years later, revised, and published (1831). In June 1815, she visited Belgium and was near to Waterloo when Napoleon was finally defeated. She published an account of her observations as 'Explanation of the Sketches and Circumstantial Detail [...] Relative to the Battle of Waterloo' included in a popular miscellany of documents and plans, The Battle of Waterloo (1815), and these writings formed the kernel of her revised and expanded Narrative of a Residence in Belgium (1817). A visit to Italy in 1817-18 resulted in the work for which she is best known, Rome in the Nineteenth Century (1820).

In 1822, she married Stephen Eaton, a banker, with whom she raised a family of two sons and two daughters. Her next work, Continental Adventures: A Novel (1826), was a fiction based on her own travels. In her later years she revised her Narrative of a Residence as The Days of Battle (1853), but produced no other notable work. She died of breast cancer in 1859.

Sources:

Taylor, Clare L. 'Eaton [née Waldie], Charlotte Anne (1788–1859), writer'. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 Sept. 2004. Oxford University Press. Web. 14 Oct. 2014. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/28447

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