Mary Howitt

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Standard Name: Howitt, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Botham
Married Name: Mary Howitt
Pseudonym: Wilfreda
Between them, Mary Howitt and her husband William wrote and published over 180 books. Hers alone, at her death, occupied forty pages of the British Museum printed catalogue.
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London.
1, 261
Bearing the expenses of a large family, they needed to harness their literary productivity to earning potential.
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London.
1, 134-5
As an opportunistic writer in several low-status, low-cost genres, accustomed to placing the same work in several successive venues, MH left a complex, even confusing bibliography, not yet reduced to order by scholars.
Black and white, head-and-shoulders photograph of the aged Mary Howitt. She is dressed in black: a dark hood covers her grey hair and white cap; her black, patterned cloak, tied with dark ribbons, covers a dark dress buttoned in front. Her eyes are cast down.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Sarah Josepha Hale
The original edition ran to just over nine hundred pages, and was illustrated with two hundred and thirty portrait wood engravings. SJH dated her prefatory material at Philadelpha on 4 July 1851; a note added...
Textual Production Charles Dickens
Other contributions were appeared from Mrs Alexander , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Edward Bulwer-Lytton , Caroline Chisholm (later parodied by CD ), Wilkie Collins , Dinah Mulock and Georgiana Craik , Amelia B. Edwards ,...
Textual Production Elizabeth Ham
EH anonymously contributed Mabel (a ghost story about a deaf girl) to an anthology, The Remembrance, edited by Thomas Roscoe and dedicated to Queen Adelaide .
This volume also contained work by Felicia Hemans
Textual Production Christian Isobel Johnstone
She included her own work, along with that of Gore , Mitford , Howitt , Mrs Fraser , and Catherine Crowe . Several editions appeared, up to an eleventh in 1862.
Feminist Companion Archive.
Textual Production L. E. L.
She handed on the latter post to Mary Howitt at her marriage. She had been contributing to such lavish annual publications since she wrote for the Forget-Me-Not in 1823, and her name became closely associated...
Textual Production Matilda Hays
In 1847, while still in her twenties, MH was led by her desire to improve the lot of women to found a periodical. In the words of her later application for a Civil List pension:...
Textual Features Dorothy Wellesley
DW 's selection, though, demonstrates a serious interest in women's literary and feminist history. Of the selections whose authors can be identified, almost half are women. Though Marguerite, Lady Blessington , doyenne of the albums...
Textual Features Christian Isobel Johnstone
Johnstone's Edinburgh Magazine was heavily political in content, while Tait's was designed to have greater appeal to the general reader.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Between 1832 and 1846 (when she retired) CIJ contributed over four hundred articles to the...
Textual Features Amelia B. Edwards
The pieces are, as the author notes, mostly short pieces designed for music, and suitable for drawing-room performance. Several are translated or adapted from French; many have male speakers, as Euridice is a dramatic monologue...
Residence Eliza Meteyard
On 26 June 1848 she wrote to Leigh Hunt from (apparently) Lamb Street in Spitalfields. For some years her home was the house of Margaret Gillies (a successful artist, portraitist, and feminist, who lived...
Reception L. E. L.
Although LEL died on the cusp of the Victorian period, she was widely read in its early years, and was invoked explicitly by many other writers who followed her, including women poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Reception Eliza Meteyard
It was granted by William Gladstone at the instigation of Mary and William Howitt .
Lightbown, Ronald W., and Eliza Meteyard. “Introduction”. The Life of Josiah Wedgwood, Cornmarket Press.
Reception Elizabeth Gaskell
Around the time of Ruth's appearance, Swedish novelist and feminist Fredrika Bremer (who was probably introduced to EG by William and Mary Howitt ) wrote: Dear Elizabeth, dear sister in spirit, if I may...
Publishing Caroline Bowles
In April 1835 CB 's review of Mary Howitt 's The Seven Temptations appeared in Blackwood's.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research.
116: 332
Publishing Anna Mary Howitt
During her time in Munich and her briefer time in Oberammergau, AMH wrote articles which were published in the Ladies' Companion, the Athenæum, and Household Words. Her description of the Oberammergau passion...

Timeline

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Texts

Howitt, William, and Mary Howitt. The Literature and Romance of Northern Europe. Colburn, 1852.
Bremer, Fredrika. The Neighbours. Translator Howitt, Mary, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1842.
Bremer, Fredrika. The President’s Daughters. Translator Howitt, Mary, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1843.
Howitt, Mary. The Seven Temptations. R. Bentley, 1834.
Howitt, Mary. Wood Leighton. R. Bentley, 1836.