Mary Linskill

-
ML was a regional novelist, short-story writer, and occasionally a poet, whose fiction is shaped by the Yorkshire port of Whitby: by the place of its abbey in religious history and of its fishing and seafaring during the later nineteenth century, in which she wrote. She also described Whitby in some topographical pieces. What survives of her diary and letters throws some light on what is perhaps (except to her continuing local readership) the most compelling aspect of her career: her prideful, touchy, and desperate struggles to wrest a living from her writing.

Milestones

13 December 1840
Mary Jane Linskill , the eldest of six surviving children, was born in a small house at Blackburns Yard, Whitby, in North Yorkshire.
Recent biographer Cordelia Stamp believes that in the century since ML was publishing, the sparse facts of her life grew into a story based on widely accepted half truths and comfortable cliches, but that the truth is legible in her own words in her books, letters, and diary.
Stamp, Cordelia. Mary Linskill. Caedmon of Whitby, 1980.
prelims
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Quinlan, David, and Arthur Frederick Humble. Mary Linskill: The Whitby Novelist. Horne and Son, 1969.
5
Stamp, Cordelia. Mary Linskill. Caedmon of Whitby, 1980.
1
November 1884
ML first reached a wide readership when her second novel, Between the Heather and the Northern Sea, emerged in three-volume form from Bentley , having been serialized in Good Words from January that year.
Stamp, Cordelia. Mary Linskill. Caedmon of Whitby, 1980.
prelims, 105
British Library Catalogue.
1891
For Pity's Sake, which appeared posthumously, was, says Cordelia Stamp , the last novel that ML wrote—or rather the last she worked at, revising it from an early story.
This book is not listed in the catalogues of the British Library , Cambridge University Library or OCLC WorldCat. The Bodleian lists it as For Pity's Sake; and, The Lost Leader, 1892, suggesting an edition along with the earlier story.
Stamp, Cordelia. Mary Linskill. Caedmon of Whitby, 1980.
prelims, 114
9 April 1891
ML , aged only fifty, died at Spring Vale, near Whitby, of apoplexy.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Quinlan, David, and Arthur Frederick Humble. Mary Linskill: The Whitby Novelist. Horne and Son, 1969.
42

Biography

Birth and Family

13 December 1840
Mary Jane Linskill , the eldest of six surviving children, was born in a small house at Blackburns Yard, Whitby, in North Yorkshire.
Recent biographer Cordelia Stamp believes that in the century since ML was publishing, the sparse facts of her life grew into a story based on widely accepted half truths and comfortable cliches, but that the truth is legible in her own words in her books, letters, and diary.
Stamp, Cordelia. Mary Linskill. Caedmon of Whitby, 1980.
prelims
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Quinlan, David, and Arthur Frederick Humble. Mary Linskill: The Whitby Novelist. Horne and Son, 1969.
5
Stamp, Cordelia. Mary Linskill. Caedmon of Whitby, 1980.
1

Please click on login button to check your access and/or enter your credentials.
Alternatively if you don’t have access, please click on “Subscribe”.

Log inSubscribe