Mary Maria Colling

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Standard Name: Colling, Mary Maria
Birth Name: Mary Maria Colling
Indexed Name: M. M. Colling
MMC wrote at Tavistock, where she was employed as a domestic servant, in the earlier nineteenth century. Her poems were collected as Fables and other Pieces in Verse, her only published volume. Novelist Anna Eliza Bray encouraged her writing and made arrangements for the book's publication. In later years, MMC spent a short time in an asylum and died in relative obscurity at the age of forty-eight.
Stipple engraving of Mary Maria Colling by Thomas Anthony Dean after William Patten, published 1831. She is wearing a frilled cap that encloses her face, and a top with a high collar and long sleeves. Her dark, smooth hair is parted in the middle.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Anna Eliza Bray
In 1831 Bray became acquainted with a young working-class woman in the parish of Tavistock named Mary Colling . Bray was impressed by Colling's personality as well as by her literary talents, and eventually secured...
Friends, Associates Anna Eliza Bray
It was an exciting visit for them, since AEB had only met Southey once, and her husband not at all. Mary Colling was also in attendance when he first arrived, to meet the famous author...
Residence Mary Ann Browne
It seems that by late 1831 the family had moved to Liverpool for the sake of the education of MAB 's brother.
Most sources put the date later than this, but a Miss M. A...
Textual Production Anna Eliza Bray
In a letter dated February 1831, Southey suggested that she should create a good specimen of local history.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research.
116: 52
The resulting ninety-four letters, dedicated and addressed to Southey , were written between February 1832...

Timeline

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Texts

Colling, Mary Maria, and Anna Eliza Bray. Fables and Other Pieces in Verse by M.M. Colling. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1831.
Bray, Anna Eliza, and Mary Maria Colling. “Letters to Robert Southey”. Fables and Other Pieces in Verse by M.M. Colling, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1831, pp. 1-85.