Elizabeth Ann Linley

Elizabeth Ann Linley (Bath, 1754 – Bristol, 1792) was one of the most admired sopranos in eighteenth-century England. The daughter of the musician Thomas Linley, she was trained by her father and made her debut in concerts in Bath and Bristol.

In 1767 she appeared in London at Covent Garden, alongside her brother Thomas Linley, in Thomas Hull's masque The Fairy Favour. Between 1769 and 1773 she sang in London oratorios and, from 1770 to 1773, at the Three Choirs Festival. After an engagement with Thomas Matthews was broken off, an episode that inspired Samuel Foote's comedy The Maid of Bath, she eloped to France with Richard Brinsley Sheridan in 1772 and married him in April 1773. This episode may have inspired Sheridan's libretto for The Duenna (1775).

She then retired from the stage, though she continued to sing at charity performances and to give private concerts at her home, where the music historian Charles Burney sometimes accompanied her at the keyboard. She also wrote poetry and elegies on the death of her brother, and kept the accounts of the Drury Lane theatre. She is credited, though doubtfully, with music in some of her father's stage works.

Her talent was praised both during her lifetime and afterwards, and many regarded her as the finest English soprano of her time. Some fifty portraits of her survive, several by Reynolds and Gainsborough.