Mary Berry

-
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.
Stipple engraving, head and shoulders, of Mary Berry aged 86, by John Henry Robinson after a painting by James Rannie Swinton, published 1850. She looks at the viewer, wearing a white frilled cap and collar with a black bow and pearl drop earring. Her still-dark hair under her cap is parted in the middle, with ringlets at the side, and she is wearing a large drop earring. Below the portrait is written "M. Berry aet [aged] 86." National Portrait Gallery, London.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Rigby
ER appeared in public as Mrs Eastlake for the first time at the house of Lady Davy , where she was introduced to Augusta Ada Byron (Byron's daughter) and to Thackeray . At London parties...
Friends, Associates Ann Radcliffe
In later years AR was a friend of Mary Berry .
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press, 1999.
229-30
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...
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 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...
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...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

No bibliographical results available.