Fanny Holcroft

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For most of her life FC (who began publishing her poems in 1797) was driven in her writing by the urgent need for financial survival, but she shared fully in the hopes of the previous radical generation to have an effect on the world through reformist writing. She began with poetry and later worked at both translation and original fiction. A surviving manuscript play was probably not her only work in this genre.

Milestones

21 February 1780

Fanny Margaretta Holcroft (who later published as FH ) was born in London into the middle of a large and spread-out family from several marriages. She was not baptised until 11 July 1785.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Ashfield, Andrew, editor. Romantic Women Poets. Manchester University Press.
2:87

January, February 1797

Monthly Magazine printed respectively Annabella and The Penitent Mother, two poems written by FH at an early age.
Ashfield, Andrew, editor. Romantic Women Poets. Manchester University Press.
2:88-90, 271

Early 1817

FH issued her second and last novel, Fortitude and Frailty.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
2: 447

7 October 1844

FH died, allegedly of mania, at 40 Cumberland Street, London.
Ashfield, Andrew, editor. Romantic Women Poets. Manchester University Press.
2:88

Biography

When FH was baptised at the age of five, her name was given in the register as Fanny Margaretta Holcroft. This indicates thatFanny was not merely a nickname, as it was in the case of others.
Ashfield, Andrew. Emails to Isobel Grundy about Fanny Holcroft.
Many reference sources call her Frances nonetheless.

Birth and Family

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