Grace Cottle

Grace Cottle was the wife of Robert Cottle of Trowbridge. Upon her husband's death, Grace removed to Bristol, where she lived with her son, Robert Cottle, whose son, Joseph (1770-1853) would become a Bristol bookseller, making a name for himself in the 1790s as publisher of the early poems of Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and some lesser Romantic figures. References to Grace Cottle appear in two letters of Anne Steele to her stepmother; also in William Steele’s letter to Joseph Cottle at Trowbridge, 28 June 1736. Joseph Cottle the bookseller placed a letter by Anne Steele to his grandmother, dated 18 May 1761 (letter 48 below), into his album of autograph letters (known as Cottle’s Bristol Album, now in the possession of Cornell University). For the Anne Steele letters, see Whelan, gen. ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840 (2011), vol. 2, vol. ed. Julia B. Griffin.