She was the daughter and oldest surviving child of
John Lee (died 1781), actor and theatrical manager, and was born in
London. Her father was jailed twice for bankruptcy before she was 25. Her first piece,
The Chapter of Accidents, a three-act drama based on
Denis Diderot's , was produced by
George Colman the Elder at the
Haymarket Theatre on 5 August 1780 (having been written eight years previously) and was an immediate success. When her father died in 1781, Lee spent the proceeds of the play on establishing a school at
Bath, where she made a home for her sisters Anne and
Harriet. Her novel
The Recess, or a Tale of other Times (1783–1785) was a historical romance.
The Recess, set in Elizabethan times, revolves around two fictional daughters of
Mary, Queen of Scots. Lee also wrote the play
Almeyda, Queen of Granada (1796), a long
tragedy in
blank verse, which opened at
Drury Lane on 20 April 1796 with Lee's friend
Sarah Siddons in the lead role, but ran for only five nights.
William Hazlitt might consider it "dismal" by comparison with the works of
Ann Radcliffe, but its influence both on the Gothic school of the
Minerva Press, and on figures like
Walter Scott is nonetheless clear. From this work, Italian writer Carlo Federici wrote the play
Il paggio di Leicester ''(Leicester's Page)
and, in turn, that became the source of Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra, (Elizabeth, Queen of England)'' the 1812 opera by
Gioachino Rossini, the libretto of which was written by Giovanni Schmidt. Sophia also contributed two tales to the collection of
Canterbury Tales written by her sister
Harriet Lee, between 1797 and 1805. Other works included
The Life of a Lover (1804) and
Ormond; or the Debauchee (1810). She died at her house near
Clifton, Bristol on 13 March 1824. In 1803, Sophia Lee gave up the management of the girls' school in Bath. She spent her remaining years in seclusion and settled in Clifton near Bristol in 1812, where she died on March 13, 1824 at the age of 73.
Charlotte von Stein used the novel
The Two Emilys as a model for her drama
Die Zwey Emilien. ==Works==