Amelia Opie (née Alderson, 1769–1853) was a writer with a wide social circle who produced poetry, plays (since lost), novels, tales, essays, and children’s literature. Her early work was influenced by both the culture of sensibility and the ideals of the French Revolution; her later work was largely didactic and religious, following her conversion to the Quaker faith in 1825. Born in the Radical city of Norwich and nurtured by Dissenting parents, Amelia Alderson emerged in the early 1790s as a writer of song lyrics, political poetry, and one anonymously published novel on the Minerva Press, The Dangers of Coquetry (1790). A friend of Godwin and Wollstonecraft and acquaintance of Mary Hays and Elizabeth Inchbald, she rose to rapid celebrity, publishing three volumes of poetry, two novels, and one collection of tales between 1801 and 1808, as well as numerous songs. After a brief fallow period, she produced a further five novels, three volumes of tales, and one story for children between 1812 and 1825. Her fiction contributed to the tradition of the philosophical novel, featuring otherwise admirable characters who suffer from a key error in judgment leading to reflection and debate. Her poetry, culminating in Lays for the Dead (1834), contributed especially to the development of elegy in the period.