COWLEY, HANNAH (1743-1869), English dramatist, and poet, daughter of Philip Parkhouse, a bookseller at Tiverton, Devonshire, was born in 1743 and died at Tiverton, March II, 1809. She married a captain in the East India Dock Company's service, who died in 1797. Between 1776 and 1795 she wrote 13 plays, of which The Belle's Stratagem (1782) for many years kept the stage.