Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Russell Mitford
-
Standard Name: Mitford, Mary Russell
Birth Name: Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
, poet, playwright, editor, letter-writer, memoirist, and—in just one work—novelist, is best known for her sketches of rural life, especially those in the successive volumes of Our Village (whose first appeared in 1824). Her greatest success came when, under the pressure of her father's inexhaustible capacity for running up debt, she turned from the respected genres of poetry and plays to work at something more popular and remunerative.
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It may be significant that this was just two months before her father's death, though her friendship with the Gurney family was also important in her decision to convert. For more than a year she...
Cultural formation
Frances Arabella Rowden
FAR
came from the English middle class. She was an Anglican
in religion. Mary Russell Mitford
represents her as a young teacher taking a relaxed attitude to religious ideas in literary contexts (her students were...
death
Robert Southey
A year and a half before he died Mary Russell Mitford
wrote of him: the mind gone—dark depression and utter failure of intellect.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers, 1870.
2: 232
He has a particularly striking monument in Poets' Corner in...
Education
Mary Martha Sherwood
St Quintin was a sophisticated educator who had been French Ambassador in London, and who published pedagogical books which took into consideration the age and development of the children for whom they were designed. He...
Education
Fanny Kemble
She studied French and Italian literatures, dancing, and acting under the evangelical influence of this Englishwoman teaching in Paris.
Marshall, Dorothy. Fanny Kemble. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977.
17
Rowden was turning increasingly to religion, but still set store by her girls' productions of...
Education
Mary Howitt
Her sister Ann had become a pupil at this school the previous year. Kilham involved the girls in visiting the poor, and her friendship with the poet James Montgomery
first awoke Mary's interest in the...
Education
Elizabeth Taylor
Her first school, where she went at the age of six, was a little private establishment called Leopold House, which gave a grounding in English and maths and team games.
Beauman, Nicola. The Other Elizabeth Taylor. Persephone Books, 2009.
12-13
When Betty was eleven...
Education
L. E. L.
This school was advanced for its time, and had educated women such as Mary Russell Mitford
and Lady Caroline Lamb
. Rowden was herself a writer. While there, LEL learned a great deal of French...
Education
Frances Arabella Rowden
Students at the school during the brief period when Rowden was a pupil included a couple of future writers: Martha Mary Butts, later Sherwood, who knew Rowden as a privileged girl in the top...
Family and Intimate relationships
Eliza Cook
After moving into the home of Weekly Dispatch editor James Harmer
, she became involved in a scandal (large enough to have been known to Elizabeth Barrett Browning
, who wrote of it to Mary Russell Mitford
Family and Intimate relationships
Amelia Opie
He was also lame. According to Mary Russell Mitfordall was arranged and the time fixed for the wedding. It went off on agreement, because each had enough to live on [poorly and singly]...
Family and Intimate relationships
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
Respectable women had always shunned Blessington on account of her past; now her present too was publicly unacceptable. Her sister Ellen, now well married, dropped her.
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington,. “Introduction”. Conversations of Lord Byron, edited by Ernest J. Lovell, Princeton University Press, 1969, pp. 3-114.
Mary Ann Browne
married (after some delay and difficulty, according to Mary Russell Mitford
) James Gray
.
Archives of the Royal Literary Fund, 1790-1918.
Family and Intimate relationships
Selina Davenport
He was in his early twenties, just embarking on a literary career which began with writing poetry (melancholy in tone) and editing and criticising the poetry of others. He enjoyed the patronage of Edmund Burke
Family and Intimate relationships
Eleanor Anne Porden
Although EAP
was not beautiful—indeed, Mary Russell Mitford
(no beauty herself) remarked on her ugliness—
L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, editor. The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford as Recorded in Letters from Her Literary Correspondents. Hurst and Blackett, 1882.
1: 121
she was courted by many men. She turned down all proposals of marriage on the grounds that she...
Timeline
11 July 1798
Thomas Green
reported (not favourably) on Miss Linwood's Exhibition of Needle Work, of works imitating famous paintings such as a Raphael
madonna.
1825
Alexander Dyce
, then a twenty-seven-year-old reluctant clergyman, published his Specimens of British Poetesses, a project in rediscovering women's literary history.
Joseph Henry Parker
took over his uncle's Oxford bookselling and publishing business; as J. H. Parker
it soon became the foremost publisher of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement.
17 February 1847
The Whittington Club
(named after the poor boy who became Lord Mayor of London) held its first meeting. Unlike traditional gentlemen's clubs, it welcomed women and lower-middle-class men.
Autumn1853
Mary Russell Mitford
complained satirically of a Pusey
ite curate in Reading, admired (to her embarrassment) by other women.
1861
A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued what seems to be the earliest version of a game called Authors, whose object was to collect sets of cards bearing the names of writers and the...
Texts
Mitford, Mary Russell. Atherton, and Other Tales. Hurst and Blackett, 1854.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Belford Regis; or, Sketches of a Country Town. R. Bentley, 1835.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Charles the First. John Duncombe, 1834.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Christina, the Maid of the South Seas. F. C. and J. Rivington , 1811.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Country Stories. Saunders and Otley, 1837.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Dramatic Scenes, Sonnets, and Other Poems. G. B. Whittaker, 1827.
Mitford, Mary Russell, editor. Finden’s Tableaux. C. Tilt, 1841.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Foscari. G. B. Whittaker, 1826.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Gaston de Blondeville. Hurst and Blackett, 1854.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Inez de Castro. J. Dicks, 1841.
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray, Hugh Thomson, Mary Russell Mitford, and Hugh Thomson. “Introduction”. Our Village, Macmillan, 1902, p. vii - liii.
Mitford, Mary Russell. “Introduction by the Editor”. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends, edited by Alfred Guy Kingham L’Estrange, Harper and Brothers, 1870, pp. 13-39.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Julian. G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1823.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Letters of Mary Russell Mitford, Second Series. Editor Chorley, Henry Fothergill, R. Bentley and Son, 1872.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Narrative Poems on the Female Character, in the Various Relations of Human Life. Printed by A. J. Valpy, 1813.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Our Village. Whittaker, 1832.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Poems. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1810.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Recollections of a Literary Life; or, Books, Places and People. Harper and Brothers, 1852.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Recollections of a Literary Life; or, Books, Places and People. R. Bentley, 1852.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Recollections of a Literary Life; or, Books, Places and People. Cambridge University Press, 2010. http://www.cambridge.org/series/sSeries.asp?code=CLOR, http://www.cambridge.org/series/sSeries.asp?code=CLOR.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Rienzi. J. Cumberland, 1828.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Sadak and Kalasrade; or, The Waters of Oblivion. Printed for the proprietor, 1835.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Dramatic Works of Mary Russell Mitford. Hurst and Blackett, 1854.
Mitford, Mary Russell, and William Harness. The Life of Mary Mary Russell Mitford, Related in a Selection from Her Letters to Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, R. Bentley, 1870.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers, 1870.
