Mary Berry

16 March 1763 - 21 November 1852

Standard Name: Berry, Mary

Used Form: Miss Berry

Used Form: the editor of Madame Du Deffand's letters

MB participated in the English literary scene from the 1780s to the 1820s. She edited collections of letters, had a play produced and published, wrote two books comparing the social and cultural climates of England and France, and was a lifelong diary-keeper and correspondent. From the point of view of literary history, her most interesting achievment is perhaps a side effect of her editorial projects: recovery of life-writing by seventeenth-century women.

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Connections

Connections	Author name Sort ascending	Excerpt
Textual Production	Lucy Hutchinson	The editor of the first, lavishly-produced edition of this history recommended it particularly to female readers, as more entertaining than most novels. He also silently cut from it about 9,000 words, besides tinkering with the...
Friends, Associates	Elizabeth Hervey	EH 's probably full social life has left few traces. She is mentioned twice among Mary Berry 's circle in 1791, and Berry paid her the oblique compliment of calling her Mrs. Pompoustown Hervey after...
Friends, Associates	Eliza Fletcher	Hamilton, herself a conservative, set about de-demonizing EF 's political reputation. She had good success in persuading her friends that Mrs Fletcher was not the ferocious Democrat she had been represented, and that she neither...
Friends, Associates	Catherine Fanshawe	CF 's friends included other highly literate middle-class women such as Mary Berry and Anne Grant in Edinburgh. (Her friendship with Grant was maintained entirely by correspondence—she and her sisters hoped to visit Edinburgh in...
Textual Production	Catherine Fanshawe	Mary Berry 's Journals and Correspondence, posthumously published in 1865, added another minor poem to CF 'surviving canon: The Country Cat. Berry, Mary. Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry. Editor Lewis, Lady Theresa, Longmans, Green, 1865, 3 vols. 3: 526-8
Textual Features	Catherine Fanshawe	One of the poems, a delightful Ode which imitates or parodies several well-known passages in various works by Gray , was written not by CF but by her friend Mary Berry , some time before...
Literary responses	Catherine Fanshawe	CF 's immediately posthumous reputation rested, like her writings themselves, on oral tradition. She had the admiration of William Cowper and Walter Scott , as well as Joanna Baillie , Anne Grant , and Mary Berry
Friends, Associates	Maria Edgeworth	By now ME was a celebrity, and could count on being introduced to the local literati when she travelled. On this visit to London she finally met Etiénne Dumont , the utilitarian, with whom she...
Cultural formation	Anne Damer	The painter and diarist Joseph Faringdon commented on AD 's wearing men's clothes, as well as on the ecstacy of meeting and the agony of parting between her and the two MissBerry s. Lanser, Susan Sniader. “’Pulled from the Straight’: Dorothy Wordsworth, Anne Lister, and the Poetics of Irregularity”. British Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Women Conference, Lawrence, KS, 16 Mar. 2001.
Textual Production	Anne Damer	AD 's activity as a sculptor dates mostly from after 1777. Her best-known works include the keystones of the bridge at Henley, carved to represent the rivers Thames and Isis: completed in 1785, they...
Textual Production	Anne Damer	The Lewis Walpole Library holds four volumes of AD 's notebooks, containing extracts from her own letters addressed to a woman who must be Mary Berry , thirteen complete letters from her to Horace Walpole
Textual Production	Anne Damer	AD regularly gave away copies of her work to female friends, sometimes as wedding presents. Elfenbein, Andrew. Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role. Columbia University Press, 1999. 109 The Chawton House Library copy is inscribed as her gift to the Hon. Agar Ellison . The Lewis Walpole Library
Family and Intimate relationships	Anne Damer	Mary Berry (whose social and financial position was precarious) wrote to AD in a panic to enjoin caution in face of an apparent public charge that they were lovers. Elfenbein, Andrew. Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role. Columbia University Press, 1999. 104, 105
Travel	Anne Damer	In the first winter of her widowhood AD went abroad to study art. Later she escaped newspaper harrassment by travelling to Italy: Rome and Florence (where she met Walpole's friend Horace Mann ). This voyage...
Cultural formation	Anne Damer	Literary historian Andrew Elfenbein argues that these attacks formed part of a general assault on the morals of the aristocracy. AD stepped up her artistic activities during the next decade, and this rendered her liable...

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