Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/457

Rh  marriage, yet her ear was always open to love addresses, which she answered in little poems and letters.

By one of her letters, wherein she gives a very agreeable description of the Hague, it appears she had been in Holland. She is said to be the inventor of novels or romances taken from familiar life and incident, which she wrote with such a pleasant vivacity, that the long romances of eight or ten volumes, as those of Cyrus, Cleopatra, Cassandra, &c. were seldom read afterwards. Mr. Bayle tells us, that at first she set out in this long way, and laid a plan to contain one of several volumes, designing to represent under fictitious names, and with some alterations, the adventures of a great lady, who married beneath her dignity; but, being threatened with the resentment of the persons concerned, dropped her design, and devised the new way of novels. Her works were soon after printed in ten volumes, and reprinted at Paris in 1702.

the death of Robert of Anjou, king of Naples, in 1343, his kingdom, which was in a flourishing condition, descended to his grand-daughter Joan, who had married his relation, Andrew, brother to Lewis of Anjou, elected king of Hungary; a match which seemed to cement the happiness and prosperity of that house, but proved the source of all its misfortunes. Andrew pretended to reign in his own right; and Joan, though but eighteen years of age, insisted that he should only be considered as the queen's husband. A Franciscan friar, called brother Robert, by whose advice Andrew was wholly governed, lighted up the flames of