Mary Howitt

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Between them, Mary Howitt and her husband William wrote and published over 180 books. Hers alone, at her death, occupied forty pages of the British Museum printed catalogue.
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London.
1, 261
Bearing the expenses of a large family, they needed to harness their literary productivity to earning potential.
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London.
1, 134-5
As an opportunistic writer in several low-status, low-cost genres, accustomed to placing the same work in several successive venues, MH left a complex, even confusing bibliography, not yet reduced to order by scholars.

Milestones

12 March 1799

Mary Botham (later MH ) was born at Whitecliffe near Coleford in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, the second in a family of three daughters and a son.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London.
24

By 22 February 1834

MH published The Seven Temptations, which she thought her best and most original work; the same year came Sketches of Natural History, which contains her best-remembered short piece: The Spider and the Fly.
The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830-1870. http://replay.web.archive.org/20070714065452/http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~asp/v2/home.html.
330 (1834): 139
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.

30 January 1888

MH died of bronchitis in Rome, aged eighty-eight, three weeks after her audience with Pope Leo XIII .
Woodring, Carl Ray. Victorian Samplers: William and Mary Howitt. University of Kansas Press.
222, 225

Biography

Birth and Family

12 March 1799

Mary Botham (later MH ) was born at Whitecliffe near Coleford in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, the second in a family of three daughters and a son.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London.
24