CLARA, the authoress of The Old English Baron, was the daughter of the Rev. William Reeve, rector of Preston and of Kerton in Suffolk, and perpetual curate of St Nicholas, and was born at Ipswich in 1723. Her father was "an old Whig," and from him she learned all that she knew: he was her oracle, and used to make her read the parliamentary debates while he smoked his pipe after supper. Under the same paternal tuition, she also read Rapin's History of England, Cato's Letters, the Greek and Roman histories, and Plutarch's Lives, at an age when few people of either sex can read their own names. She first became an authoress by translating from the original Latin Barclay's fine old romance of Argenis, which was published in 1762, under the title of The Phoenix. It was not, however, until 1767 that she produced her Champion of Virtue, afterwards called The Old English Baron, a work written after the manner of the Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole. This production is inscribed to Mrs Bridgen, the daughter of Richardson, who is stated to have lent some assistance in the revision and correction of the work. The success of The Old English Baron encouraged Miss Reeve to devote more of her leisure hours to literary composition, and accordingly she published in succession The Two Mentors, The Progress of Romance, The Exile, The School for Widows, Plans of Education, and Memoirs of Sir Roger de Clarendon, a natural son of the Black Prince, with Anecdotes of many other eminent persons of the fourteenth century. The various novels produced by this lady are all marked by excellent good sense, pure morality, and a considerable command of those qualities requisite to constitute a good romance. They were, generally speaking, favourably received at the time; but none of them took the same strong possession of the public mind as The Old English Baron, upon which the fame of the author may be considered as now exclusively rested, and by which alone she will be known to posterity. She died at Ipswich in December 1808, in her seventy-fifth year. (For an estimate of her works, see ROMANCE.)