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 Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Friends, Associates	Lady Eleanor Butler	Among their many visitors (apart from the local gentry, with whom they duly established links), close friends included Anna Seward , Henrietta Maria Bowdler (who wrote mock-flirtatiously of LEB as her veillard [sic] or old...
Friends, Associates	Harriet Martineau	HM 's social circle vastly expanded at this time until she knew virtually all the prominent people, particularly the political men, of her day. As she recorded in her Autobiography, however, she refused to...
Friends, Associates	Maria Callcott	In Richmond and elsewhere MC met emigrés fleeing the French Revolution. She also met a number of women who wrote: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire , Mary and Agnes Berry , and Anne Damer . In...
Health	Amelia Opie	By the time of the Great Exhibition AO was confined to a wheelchair. She did not, however, allow this to damp her spirits, but is said to have proposed a race with Mary Berry ...
Intertextuality and Influence	Hannah More	More lays her heaviest emphasis on the need for observing propriety. Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press, 1952. 195 She expresses her belief in original sin, and devotes a chapter to human corruption; but this deals also with salvation. Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press, 1952. 117 While she...
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
Literary responses	Lady Rachel Russell	As love-letters, they made a great and immediate impression on their readers. Yet later this year Mary Russell Mitford wrote of LRR with dislike. Mitford found her heavy, preachy, and prosy. As a writer, she...
Literary responses	Joanna Baillie	The Critical Review assumed the author was male. It thought the versification monotonous but warmly praised both preface and plays. Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series. 24 (1798): 1-22 Initial reaction from individuals (mostly favourable) concentrated on the puzzle of authorship...
names	Joanna Baillie	BirthName: Joanna Baillie Nickname: Jack JB was called Jack by her family as a child. Baillie, Joanna. “Editorial Materials”. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie, edited by Judith Bailey Slagle, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, pp. ix - xiv, 1. 7 Self-constructed: Mrs Joanna Baillie On 7 February 1814 the fifty-one-year-old JB notified her friend Mary Berry that she was...
Occupation	Anne Damer	AD appeared in private theatricals first at her brother-in-law the Duke of Richmond 's, and later at Strawberry Hill. Elfenbein, Andrew. Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role. Columbia University Press, 1999. 97 In November 1800 she delivered Joanna Baillie 's Epilogue to the Theatrical Representation at...
Reception	Hannah More	Again this work generated both a flood of praise (much of it in letters, some coming from religious leaders or from royalty) and a storm of criticism and abuse. qtd. in Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press, 1952. 120 The Bishop of London...
Reception	Joanna Baillie	Mary Berry took the lead in promoting the volume. Baillie, Joanna. “Editorial Materials”. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie, edited by Judith Bailey Slagle, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, pp. ix - xiv, 1. 11 Editing De Monfort for her British Theatre in 1808, Elizabeth Inchbald wrote of the hero as a lunatic possessing every vice which pride engenders, yet...
Residence	Mary Somerville	MS and her family took up residence for the season at 6 Curzon Street, London, next to their friends Mary and Agnes Berry . Patterson, Elizabeth Chambers. Mary Somerville and the Cultivation of Science, 1815-1840. Martinus Nijhoff, 1983. 51, 205n119
Textual Features	Lydia Maria Child	LMC 's first four subjects were all known for their writings and for their resistance to tyrannical authority, either political or religious, but she is more interested here in what she alleges to have been...
Textual Features	Lady Rachel Russell	Mary Berry mentions a sort of review of her life written by LRR in old age, lamenting her lack of fervour in religious belief and particularly her inability to arrive at a perfect state of...

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