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
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Gaskell
EG met Mary Howitt in Heidelberg and attended many society balls with her. They shared much in common and became close friends.
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber.
143-4
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Gaskell
One happy result of this expansion of her sphere was the cementing of her friendship with Mary and William Howitt .
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber.
219
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Gaskell
She also liked to escape from Manchester when she was able to. She spent the evening of Christmas 1850 at William and Mary Howitt 's home in London swapping ghost stories with them and Eliza Meteyard .
Mitchell, Sally. The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Women’s Reading 1835-1880. Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
32
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Gaskell
EG wrote Mary Barton following the death of her ten-month-old son in 1845. Johann Ludwig Uhland 's Auf der Überfahrt, from which she takes one of her epigraphs, refers to two from the spirit-land...
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...
Friends, Associates Anna Maria Hall
One of AMH 's closest friends was the actress Helen Faucit , later Lady Martin. Though socially conservative in her attitudes, she was apparently more ready than her husband to achieve friendly relations with those...
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
Friends, Associates Matilda Hays
By her twenties, MH was well-acquainted with several prominent figures in England's social, political, and literary scene. Her circle included Mary Howitt , Eliza Meteyard , William Charles Macready , Samuel Laurence , Geraldine Jewsbury
politics Matilda Hays
Other key figures involved included Charles Dickens , Giuseppe Mazzini , Mary and William Howitt , and Douglas Jerrold .
Gleadle, Kathryn. The Early Feminists. Macmillan.
141
Scholar Kathryn Gleadle calls this radical unitarian club a unique, feminist experiment in adult...
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:...
Friends, Associates Felicia Hemans
FH 's literary correspondents and friends included Grace Aguilar , Joanna Baillie (whose Beacon she recalled reading when very young), and Mary Howitt .
Elwood, Anne Katharine. Memoirs of the Literary Ladies of England, from the Commencement of the Last Century. Henry Colburn.
238
Chorley, Henry Fothergill. Memorials of Mrs. Hemans. Saunders and Otley.
I: 145
She was acquainted with Maria Jane Jewsbury ...
Anthologization Barbara Hofland
BH seems to have remained saleable for a long time, since The Gift of Friendship . . . with contributions by . . . Mrs. Hofland appeared as late as 1877. Others included were Mary Howitt
Textual Production Anna Mary Howitt
She chose epigraphs to chapter one from Keats and James Shirley , to chapters three and fourteen from Mary Howitt , and elsewhere from Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Percy Bysshe Shelley , and writers in French, German, and Italian.
Textual Production Anna Mary Howitt
AMH 's first art commission was apparently the illustrations for her mother 's Hymns and Fireside Verses, executed in her early teens and published in 1839. After her death her mother's autobiography also appeared with her illustrations.
Woodring, Carl Ray. Victorian Samplers: William and Mary Howitt. University of Kansas Press.
111
Literary responses Anna Mary Howitt
Mary Howitt called the Boadicea picture very fine, truly sublime.
Lee, Amice. Laurels & Rosemary: The Life of William and Mary Howitt. Oxford University Press.
216
Ruskin had demanded in a letter: What do you know about Boadicea? Leave such subjects alone and paint me a pheasant's wing.
Lee, Amice. Laurels & Rosemary: The Life of William and Mary Howitt. Oxford University Press.
217
Bessie Rayner Parkes

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