Susannah Dobson

Susannah Dobson née Dawson (died 1795) was an English translator, from the south of England.

The daughter of John Dawson of the parish of St Dunstan, London, she married in 1759 a physician, Dr Matthew Dobson of Liverpool, who died at Bath, Somerset in 1784. They had three children.

Frances Burney mentions that in 1780 Susannah Dobson was ambitious to get into Mrs Thrale's circle, but the latter was not keen: "Mrs Dobson… persecutes me strangely as if with violent & undesired Friendship; yet Mrs Lewis says She is jealous." A modern view of what Thrale wrote in Thraliana is that it implied Dobson was a lesbian. Burney wrote of her, "Though coarse, low-bred, forward, self-sufficient, and flaunting, she seems to have a strong masculine understanding." Dr Dobson had become Mrs Thrale's physician.

Susannah Dobson died 30 September 1795, and was buried at St Paul's, Covent Garden.

In 1775 Dobson published in two volumes her Life of Petrarch, collected from "Mémoires pour la vie de François Petrarch" (by Jacques-François de Sade). It was reprinted in 1777, and several times up to a sixth edition in 1805. She claimed in 1780 that it had earned her £400. Her second work was a translation of Sainte-Palaye's Literary History of the Troubadours, 1779; 2nd e. 1807. In 1784 she translated the same author's Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry, and in 1791 Petrarch's De remediis utriusque fortunae, as Petrarch's View of Human Life.

Also ascribed to Susannah Dobson are the anonymous Dialogue on Friendship and Society (1777) and Historical Anecdotes of Heraldry and Chivalry, published in Worcester about 1795.