Mary Russell Mitford

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MRM , poet, playwright, editor, letter-writer, memoirist, and—in just one work—novelist, is best known for her sketches of rural life, especially those in the successive volumes of Our Village (whose first appeared in 1824). Her greatest success came when, under the pressure of her father's inexhaustible capacity for running up debt, she turned from the respected genres of poetry and plays to work at something more popular and remunerative.

Milestones

16 December 1787

MRM , an only child, was born at Alresford in Hampshire.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research.
116: 193

7 February 1809

MRM wrote a poem To the Memory of Sir John Moore, which she sent her father two days later, with apology for attempting a subject too grand for her.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
1: 63-4

December 1822

The Lady's Magazine published MRM 's Landscape Sketches, the germ of her later, famous Our Village.
Some sources mistakenly give date as 1819. According to Vera Watson , MRM 's diary proves that the sketches were published later. Watson also discredits the story that Thomas Campbell rejected the sketches for the New Monthly Magazine.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research.
116: 194

By April 1824

The publisher George Whittaker issued a first volume of MRM 's Our Village: Sketches of Rural Life, Character, and Scenery under her name: four more volumes followed.
Quarterly Review. J. Murray.
31 (1824): 166
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research.
116: 195

Early November 1827-September 1832

A further four volumes of MRM 's Our Village appeared, one by one.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
2: 65, 137

1833

Marianne Croker mocked MRM 's prose in My Village Versus Our Village.
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.

10 January 1855

MRM died at her cottage at Swallowfield near Reading.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research.
116: 198
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.

Biography

Birth and Family

16 December 1787

MRM , an only child, was born at Alresford in Hampshire.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research.
116: 193