Mrs. Leo Hunter

English Etymology Name of a character in Charles Dickens' novel The Pickwick Papers (1836), intended to suggest a "lion hunter"; see en lion a famous person regarded with interest and curiosity. Noun en dated A woman who seeks to cultivate the company of famous and interesting people. en 1834 Mary Elizabeth Wilson Sherwood Etiquette, the American Code of Manners The third danger is, that she accepts, in lieu of the best acquaintances, second and third rate people, the hangers-on upon society, people who have not the best or freshest reputation—the Mrs. Leo Hunters, the Misses Bore and the Messrs. Fraudulent, who are a large family. en 1840 The Quarterly Review 65 266 In the salon of a Lafitte or a Mrs. Leo Hunter there may be mixtures of the sort — not in that society, either of London or Paris, which there is any pretence for comparing to the upper circles of Vienna. en 1917 John Hutton Balfour Browne Recollections Literary and Political 55 I will not say a word against a Mrs. Leo Hunter who lived in H Street, and who every Sunday evening filled her drawing-rooms with every notable person she could lay her hands on. Her house was on these occasions a museum of notorieties. Distinction of any sort was an introduction to her hospitalities. en 1940 Wyndham Lewis America, I Presume 175 She was a Mrs. Leo Hunter, model 1939. But she hunted lions as if they were rats: as if they were some noxious pest that her malign fate had decreed she should tirelessly pursue, but every millimeter of whose guts she hated. en eponyms terms derived from Dickensian works