Mary Berry

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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
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...
Textual Production Joanna Baillie
Mary Berry and Anne Damer both offered comments and revisions four years before this play was published. Lady Louisa Stuart did the same (through Walter Scott) in 1809.
Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Editor Slagle, Judith Bailey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, 2 vols.
1: 158-9, 244
Slagle, editor of JB
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 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...
Textual Production Hannah More
On 23 June, when the poem was newly written, he requested permission to print these copies, of which she should have half for her own distribution. His correspondence with HM and with Mary Berry over...
Textual Production Dorothy Sidney Countess of Sunderland
DSCS was close to her son-in-law, and continued a correspondence with him years after her daughter's death. Her letters to Halifax were published by Mary Berry in 1819, together with the letters of Lady Rachel Russell
Textual Production Lady Rachel Russell
LRR wrote the first of the thirty letters to her husband that survived for Mary Berry to publish in 1819.
Berry, Mary, and Lady Rachel Russell. Some Account of the Life of Rachael Wriothesley Lady Russell. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819.
1
Textual Production Lady Rachel Russell
Mary Berry published a brief biography of LRR , with some unpublished letters including thirty to her husband .
Quarterly Review. J. Murray.
21 (1819): 558
Textual Production Joanna Baillie
JB sent her friend Mary Berry a prologue for Fashionable Friends, Berry's play produced at Drury Lane by Anne Damer in 1802; she also wrote an epilogue for it.
Baillie, Joanna. “Editorial Materials”. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie, edited by Judith Bailey Slagle, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, pp. ix - xiv, 1.
2n7, 3
Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Editor Slagle, Judith Bailey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, 2 vols.
1: 153n2
Textual Production Joanna Baillie
JB wrote for a friend a manuscript Recollections Written at the Request of Miss Berry; the manuscript remains in the Library of the Royal College of Surgeons .
Baillie, Joanna. “Introduction”. The Selected Poems of Joanna Baillie, 1762-1851, edited by Jennifer Breen, Manchester University Press, 1999, pp. 1-25.
5 and n17
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 Joanna Baillie
She told Mary Berry that she hoped she would not give offence, since she wrote with humble boldness, regarding God & not man.
Duquette, Natasha Aleksiuk. Veiled Intent: Dissenting Women’s Approach to Biblical Interpretation. Pickwick Publications, 2016.
166
Her full title is Poems: Wherein it is attempted to describe...
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
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Harriet Martineau
Among her subjects are Lady Byron (an occasion for HM to deplore Byron 's conduct and influence), Mary Berry , Mary Russell Mitford , Charlotte Brontë , Jane Marcet , Amelia Opie , Mary Somerville

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