Melesina Trench

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Standard Name: Trench, Melesina
Birth Name: Melesina Chenevix
Married Name: Melesina St George
Married Name: Melesina Trench
Pseudonym: A Lady
Pseudonym: A Parent
MT , an Anglo-Irishwoman writing from the later eighteenth century and publishing from the early nineteenth, was in one way a typical upper-class amateur writer, whose output was mostly diaries and letters, published after her death by a son. She entertained serious literary aspirations, however. Her private writings are carefully crafted; she left a draft autobiography; and she published her own poetry in several volumes, and a series of pamphlets, locally printed, on social and political subjects.
Stipple and line engraving of a painting of Melesina Trench, by Francis Holl after George Romney, published 1862. She is seated under a tree, her hands resting on a pillar, holding what looks like a sheet of music. Her gown is light-coloured, with a ruffle around the neckline, and sleeves that are puffy at the shoulder and tight below. She wears a tall bonnet or turban on her loose curled hair. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Catherine Marsh
The names of CM ' elder siblings, three girls and one boy, were Mary (who married Francis , a son of writer Melesina Trench , and died in 1886), Matilda (who married Frederick Chalmers ),...
Family and Intimate relationships Maria Theresa Kemble
John Mitchell Kemble , the first of MTK 's five children, was born on 11 April 1807. After a crazy youthful enterprise when he and some university contemporaries (notably Richard Chenevix Trench , son of...
Friends, Associates Mary Leadbeater
She met Melesina Trench (then Melesina St George) in 1802, when the latter, a widow, had arranged to meet her agent in Ballitore to make plans about tenants at her estate at Ballybarney. There was...
Intertextuality and Influence Amelia Opie
Both in an Address to the Editor and in a series of explanatory footnotes, AO positions herself on the one hand as a historian with a proper regard for available evidence, and on the other...
Literary responses Mrs Ross
Charles Chenevix Trench (whose mother was Melesina Trench , a writer herself), who read this novel in early 1819, said that it shaped his opinions about the comparison of marriage with single life. He also...
Literary responses Marie de Sévigné
For years MS was ridiculed for her incorrect orthography, but in fact her unorthodox spelling was modern. It was that advocated by the reformers, participants in a movement to reduce the number of unphonetic letters...
Literary responses Jane Austen
Charles Chenevix Trench (soldier son of the writer Melesina Trench ) read Pride and Prejudice in 1815 and found it a very proper mixture of delicate Distresses not too flimsy, to interest even those who...
Literary responses Maria Edgeworth
Charles Chenevix Trench and his military circle (both English and Swedish) thought Harrington foolish, and when he told his mother this in a letter he added a personal criticism of the social behaviour of Maria...
Publishing Charlotte Brooke
Her father had cherished a never-executed project for a history of ancient Irish literature.
Ashley, Leonard R. N., Aaron Crossley-Seymour, Charlotte Brooke, and Aaron Crossley-Seymour. “Introduction”. Reliques of Irish Poetry, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970, p. v - xv.
vi
She had issued Proposals for this work the year before publication. The Houghton Library copy of the Proposals incorporates a...
Publishing Dorothea Du Bois
Her subscribers included Lord Annesley (of yet another branch of her paternal family) and other relations, George Berkeley and his wife Eliza Berkeley , the Dowager Countess Charleville (who had acquired that style only when...
Textual Features Mary Leadbeater
This work draws on her diary, and gives a lively picture of local life at Ballitore over nearly sixty years (ending in 1823). She goes into some detail about her family and her early memories...
Textual Production Lady Eleanor Butler
LEB and Sarah Ponsonby wrote some of their voluminous correspondence jointly. Writing was one of their major pleasures; they selected paper with loving care, and kept an equally careful tally of replies received and of...

Timeline

5 November 1857
At a meeting of the LondonPhilological Society , James Chenevix Trench (son of the poet and diarist Melesina Trench ) proposed the compilation of what eventually became the Oxford English Dictionary.