Mary Russell Mitford

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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.
Painting of Mary Russell Mitford by John Lucas, c. 1853, based on another by Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1824, which was disliked for its assertive look. Here an oval frame is painted in; Mitford wears a white ruffled cap around her face, a white collar pinned with a cameo, a grey gown and brown shawl.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Maria Jane Jewsbury
Although they had been corresponding by letter for some time, this holiday was the first time the two writers met in person. MJJ was soon accepted into Hemans ' social circle and become friends with...
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 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.
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.
17
Rowden was turning increasingly to religion, but still set store by her girls' productions of...
Friends, Associates Fanny Kemble
Mary Russell Mitford was another who knew FK well even apart from their connection through the theatre.
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.
2: 119-20
Other friends from this period or soon afterwards included the future poet and novelist Caroline Norton
Occupation Fanny Kemble
Later in 1830, when she acted Calista in Nicholas Rowe 's The Fair Penitent, Thomas Noon Talfourd told Mary Russell Mitfordthat, at a distance from the stage, he could almost have imagined her...
Literary responses Fanny Kemble
In its review the Athenæum placed Kemble in the ranks with Joanna Baillie and Mary Russell Mitford , though her published original contributions in this form are only three—her school-girl essay which became the play...
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...
Textual Features Marghanita Laski
The book aims at literary recuperation. Here ML blends analysis with celebration, but she recalls her marginalised writers primarily to raise questions about the present state of writing for children. She says that her subjects...
Leisure and Society Eliza Lynn Linton
In London, Eliza Lynn drank in artistic life. She championed the singing of Jenny Lind against those who preferred Alboni or Malibran. She performed for Samuel Laurence the role of uninformed art critic or foolometer...
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, pp. 3-114.
80
Camilla Crosland later recalled how as an unmarried...
Intertextuality and Influence Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
The elderly lady, Lady Arabella, represents a chilly view of the English aristocracy. She opens her story with a paean in praise of past times and in dispraise of the present: How interminably long the...
Textual Production Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
This work involved her in finding—and engaging in voluminous correspondence with—contributors (who often were or became her personal friends), such as Anna Maria Hall , Felicia Hemans , Amelia Opie , Mary Russell Mitford ,...
Literary responses Harriet Martineau
HM later dated her release from pecuniary care from the huge, immediate success of this first number.
Martineau, Harriet, and Gaby Weiner. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography. Virago.
1: 178
The Athenæum, after hedging its bets for half of its brief paragraph, calling Martineau unimaginative...
Literary responses Harriet Martineau
Mary Russell Mitford wrote disapprovingly of HM 's claims: I see no good in these experiments.
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.
2: 281
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna 's pamphlet Mesmerism: A Letter to Miss Martineau, argued that if the account...

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