Mary Brunton

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Standard Name: Brunton, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Balfour
Married Name: Mary Brunton
Pseudonym: The Author of Self-Control
MB , whose early-nineteenth-century writing career was cut short by her early death, was a highly intelligent, moralistic novelist, who also left journals, prayers, and some letters.
Stipple head-and-shoulders engraving of Mary Brunton by Henry Meyer after William John Thomson, 1833. She is wearing a dress with a low, square, lace-trimmed neckline and puffed, short sleeves, a shawl over one arm, and a string of pearls. Dark curls frame her face.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Reception Jane Austen
JA 's letters divide her critics. Many find them deplorably lacking in dignity and especially in sympathy; others believe that she renders the intimacies of oral relationship into written texts more successfully than almost any...
Intertextuality and Influence Henrietta Maria Bowdler
Although HMB was provoked to write by William Hayley 's unpleasant Philosophical, Historical and Moral Essay on Old Maids, 1785, she gives a mixed message. This begins with an epigraph drawn from Elizabeth Hamilton
Textual Features Lady Charlotte Bury
LCB 's novel opens sixteen years after the elopement, with Lady Howard, divorced and re-married, deeply wounded when her daughter is forbidden to play with the daughter of a more respectable peeress. For her, as...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anne Katharine Elwood
Some of the British women writers discussed in the text remain well-known, but others have slipped into obscurity. Memoirs includes: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , Griselda Murray , Frances Seymour, Lady Hertford , Hester Lynch Piozzi
Textual Production Catherine Fanshawe
The letters that CF sent to Anne Grant are not extant, but Grant's side of the correspondence leaves no doubt that the two were in constant dialogue about new books they had read, and their...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Susan Ferrier
SF 's letters deal mainly with day-to-day occurrences, but her literary opinons are always worth having. She comments on several works by Lady Charlotte Campbell (later Bury) . Reading Austen 's Emma in 1816 (the...
Friends, Associates Eliza Fletcher
Hamilton, herself a conservative, set about de-demonizing EF 's political reputation. She had good success in persuading her friends that Mrs Fletcher was not the ferocious Democrat she had been represented, and that she neither...
Textual Production Ann Taylor Gilbert
She altered the magazine's policy, reviewing Mary Brunton 's Self-Control, and then Maria Edgeworth 's Tales, I forget which series,
Gilbert, Ann Taylor. Autobiography and Other Memorials of Mrs. Gilbert. Editor Gilbert, Josiah, H. S. King, http://U of A, HSS Ruth N .
1: 203
although until then it had not been customary in that work...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anne Grant
She likes her reading to be strenuous: she recommends Jane Austen 's Mansfield Park as light reading,
Grant, Anne. Memoir and Correspondence of Mrs. Grant of Laggan. Editor Grant, John Peter, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans.
2: 68
and says she would be happy to give a whole summer to Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins 's The...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Hamilton
While in Wales they visited Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby (the ladies of Llangollen) and in the Lakes they stayed with Elizabeth Smith and her family.
Benger, Elizabeth Ogilvy. Memoirs of the late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown.
1: 152-4
Smith, Elizabeth. Fragments, In Prose and Verse. Editor Bowdler, Henrietta Maria, Richard Cruttwell.
151
In Edinburgh in 1803...
Literary responses Barbara Hofland
In the early 1820s BH seems to have been at the apex of her career. She was appreciated not only by her friend Mary Russell Mitford (who believed that nobody else could combine so much...
Textual Production Sara Maitland
SM provided an introduction to Antonia White 's The Hound and the Falcon (the novel in which White describes her return to the Roman Catholic Church ), when it was reprinted by Virago in 1982...
Travel Lydia Howard Sigourney
Like other nineteeth-century travellers (the trend is visible in Mary Brunton in 1812) she visited social and charitable institutions—[s]chools, hospitals, prisons, and asylums—as well as historic houses, castles, and beauty spots.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
183
She...
Literary responses Catherine Sinclair
Timothy C. Baker has noted that recent scholarship follows CS 's contemporaries in overlooking her adult novels. For the monument-makers, Sinclair's fame rests on a combination of civic and literary achievement; curiously, however, her widely...

Timeline

9 August 1838: The Hampstead circulating library, intended...

Writing climate item

9 August 1838

The Hampstead circulating library, intended for the middling and lower ranks, which had stocked no novels on principle except those of Scott and Edgeworth , found these were borrowed so much more often than...

Texts

Brunton, Mary. Discipline. Manners and Miller; Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814.
Brunton, Mary. Discipline. R. Bentley, 1842.
Brunton, Mary. Emmeline. Manners and Miller; John Murray, 1819.
Maitland, Sara, and Mary Brunton. “Introduction”. Self-Control, Pandora, 1986, p. ix - xi.
Brunton, Alexander, and Mary Brunton. “Memoir”. Emmeline, Manners and Miller; John Murray, 1819.
Brunton, Mary. Self-Control. Manners and Miller; Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1811.