Mrs. Leo Hunter

Name of a character in Charles Dickens' novel The Pickwick Papers (1836), intended to suggest a "lion hunter"; see lion (“a famous person regarded with interest and curiosity”).

Mrs. Leo Hunter (plural Mrs. Leo Hunters)

1. (dated) A woman who seeks to cultivate the company of famous and interesting people.
   • 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.

   • 1840, The Quarterly Review, volume 65, page 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.

   • 1917, John Hutton Balfour Browne, Recollections Literary and Political, page 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.

   • 1940, Wyndham Lewis, America, I Presume, page 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.