Mary, Lady Champion de Crespigny

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Standard Name: Champion de Crespigny, Mary,,, Lady
Birth Name: Mary Clarke
Married Name: Mary Champion de Crespigny
Pseudonym: MCC
Self-constructed Name: Mary Champion Crespigny
Titled: Lady Mary Champion de Crespigny
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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Dedications Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson
SSW dedicated to Mary Champion de Crespigny (as Lady de Crespigny) her second novel, The Fugitive Countess; or, Convent of St. Ursula. A Romance.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
2: 260
Publishing Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson
One catalogue lists this work as published in 1805. Years later SSW wrote that she had once entertained literary ambitions. It was the patronage of Lady Charlotte Finch that enabled her, when already a seasoned...
Textual Features Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson
The dedication mentions de Crespigny 's own literary labours (a conduct book, Letters of Advice from a Mother to her Son, 1780, and a novel, The Pavilion, 1796), as well as the help...
Textual Features Sarah Trimmer
In addition to Catharine Cappe 's work on Sunday schools and versions of fairy stories by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy , the magazine reviewed work by a whole library of didactic, pedagogical, or improving writers, reprinted as...
Publishing Ann Thicknesse
The first volume has a frontispiece portrait of AT , and the second has a companion piece of her late husband .
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
2: 125
The book is dedicated to Fashion Herself,
Thicknesse, Ann. The School for Fashion. Reynell, Debrett and Fores, and Robinson.
1: vi
whom...
Publishing Ann Thicknesse
While the title-page says Volume the First, the dedication to Richard Graves (a neighbour near Bath) hopes he will enjoy this second volume because he enjoyed the first.
Thicknesse, Ann. Sketches of the Lives and Writings of the Ladies of France. J. Dodsley, E. and C. Dilly, R. Cruttwell, and T. Shrimpton.
titlepage, iii
Elizabeth Carter is replaced...
Performance of text Mariana Starke
A lost tragedy by MS entitled The British Orphans was performed at Mary Champion de Crespigny 's private theatre in Camberwell near London.
Anna Margaretta Larpent , diarist and wife of the official Examiner...
Friends, Associates Mariana Starke
From at least the late 1770s MS and her family were on terms of close friendship with Eliza and William Hayley ; Mariana's earliest extant letter to Eliza Hayley is dated 22 December 1780. William...
Dedications Mariana Starke
MS made some use of a play by Antoine Marin Le Mierre , La veuve du Malabar. In her version the censor compelled some changes, like watering down the word hell-born (used of suttee)...
Friends, Associates Mary Robinson
After MR became known as the prince's mistress, the double standard in public morality made it virtually impossible for respectable women to treat her as a friend. Her admiration for Sarah Siddons was not reciprocated...
Dedications Anna Maria Porter
AMP published, with her name, her second novel, Octavia, dedicated to Mary Champion de Crespigny .
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
1: 758
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
2d ser. 24 (1798): 471
Friends, Associates Jane Porter
JP was also a friend of Mary Robinson —actress, poet, and novelist—but this friendship was threatened by Robinson's position outside respectable society. When Robinson published some lines about JP in a newspaper, Mary Champion de Crespigny
Textual Production Jane Porter
In 1800 appeared a pamphlet essay which may be by JP or to her and her sister : A Defence of the Profession of an Actor.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Stuart Bennett Rare Books & Manuscripts: A Catalogue of Books By, For, and About Women of the British Isles, 1696-1892. Stuart Bennett Rare Books & Manuscripts.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Thomas McLean
Dedications Eliza Parsons
EP 's two-act comedy The Intrigues of a Morning (adapted from Molière 's Monsieur de Pourclaugnac) was produced at Covent Garden . It was printed the same year, dedicated to Mary Champion de Crespigny .
The London Stage 1660-1800. Southern Illinois University Press.
5: 1447
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Publishing Eliza Parsons
She gave her name as Mrs. Parsons on the title-page and signed the dedication with both her names.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
1: 512
A title-page epigraph reads: Brutus said Virtue was but a name—tis more. ....

Timeline

By 22 July 1797: William Beckford published a second and more...

Women writers item

By 22 July 1797

William Beckford published a second and more marked burlesque attack on women's writing: Azemia: A Descriptive and Sentimental Novel. Interspersed with Pieces of Poetry.

Texts

Mary, Lady Champion de Crespigny,. A Monody to the Memory of the Right Honourable the Lord Collingwood. Cadell and Davis, 1810.
Mary, Lady Champion de Crespigny,. Letters of Advice from a Mother to her Son. Cadell and Davies, 1803.
Mary, Lady Champion de Crespigny,. The Pavilion. William Lane, Minerva Press, 1796.