Mary, Lady Champion de Crespigny

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MLCC used her exalted social position as a patron of writers, especially women writers. She was a habitual diarist (though little of her diary survives) and a writer of occasional poetry—for manuscript circulation, or inscription on landscape features, and at least once for print. She chose print for two longer works: a novel and a conduct-book, 1803, made up of letters addressed to her teenage son in about 1780.

Milestones

1748 or 1749

Mary Clarke, later MLCC , was born, an only daughter.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
193

About 1780

Mary Champion de Crespigny wrote the letters to her son William (her only child, then aged about fifteen) which she later published as Letters of Advice from a Mother to her Son.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
193

By mid August 1796

Mary Champion de Crespigny published her only novel, The Pavilion, in four volumes, with the Minerva Press
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
1: 670

Late 1803

Mary Champion de Crespigny published with Cadell and Davies her Letters of Advice from a Mother to her Son (written more than twenty years earlier), dedicated to the Archbishop of Canterbury (John Moore ).
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.

March 1804

The conservative Lady's Monthly Museum carried an adaptation by the miscellaneous writer Mary Pilkington : Emma: or, A Tale of Woe. Abridged from Mrs. Crespigny 's Letters to her Son, and Founded on Fact.
Society of Ladies, A, editor. The Lady’s Monthly Museum, or Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction. Vernor and Hood.
2 (March 1804): 169-79, 144

After 4 June 1810

MLCC 's last known published work was A Monody to the Memory of the Right Honourable the Lord Collingwood, dedicated as a friend to John Jervis, Lord St Vincent .
Mary, Lady Champion de Crespigny,. A Monody to the Memory of the Right Honourable the Lord Collingwood. Cadell and Davis.
prelims
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.

20 July 1812

MLCC died at Richmond House in Richmond (a riverside mansion designed in part by Robert Adam ).
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
82: 2 (August 1812): 188

Biography

She was Mrs Champion de Crespigny for most of her married life, and Lady just for her final seven years.

Birth and Family