Mary Cowden Clarke was a leading nineteenth-century Shakespearean scholar, who (in collaboration with her husband, Charles Cowden Clarke) annotated editions, compiled a concordance, and wrote a key or encyclopaedia, and on her own account produced an anthology, a book of tales, or what would now be called prequels, about the early lives of Shakespeare's female characters, and an edition that preceded the better-known one produced by her husband. She was a self-defined professional writer who translated works of musicology, edited a magazine and published poetry, articles, stories, novels, biographies, and her own autobiography.