Mary Russell Mitford

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Standard Name: Mitford, Mary Russell
Birth Name: Mary Russell Mitford
MRM , poet, playwright, editor, letter-writer, memoirist, and—in just one work—novelist, is best known for her sketches of rural life, especially those in the successive volumes of Our Village (whose first appeared in 1824). Her greatest success came when, under the pressure of her father's inexhaustible capacity for running up debt, she turned from the respected genres of poetry and plays to work at something more popular and remunerative.
Painting of Mary Russell Mitford by John Lucas, c. 1853, based on another by Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1824, which was disliked for its assertive look. Here an oval frame is painted in; Mitford wears a white ruffled cap around her face, a white collar pinned with a cameo, a grey gown and brown shawl.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Reception Caroline Clive
This poem was considered one of CC 's best works. It was praised by Mary Russell Mitford , and George Saintsbury noted its originality
Partridge, Eric Honeywood. “Mrs. Archer Clive”. Literary Sessions, Scholartis Press, 1932.
123
(though the passage on the dead wit and writer searching...
Reception Elizabeth Meeke
EM 's books sold in the USA and Canada as well as in Britain. Their readers included Mary Russell Mitford and Thomas Babington Macaulay . He called them absurd and his own taste for them...
Reception Eleanor Anne Porden
Mary Russell Mitford was given this poem to review by Whittaker ; it was then that she met EAP .
L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, editor. The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford as Recorded in Letters from Her Literary Correspondents. Hurst and Blackett, 1882, 2 vols.
1: 121
Alexander Dyce named Coeur de Lion as EAP 's best work. When she...
Reception Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Mary Russell Mitford 's memoirs, published at the beginning of 1852, presented a sympathetic and admiring but (EBB felt) far too personal picture of her. Camilla Crosland wrote about her (as well as about...
Publishing Amelia Opie
AO was enlisted for a contribution to Finden's Tableaux by its editor, Mary Russell Mitford : she wrote for it The Novice: A True Story.
Opie, Amelia. “Introduction”. Adeline Mowbray, edited by Shelley King and John B. Pierce, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. i - xxix.
xxxix
Publishing Harriet Martineau
Before the end of the year that saw the first volume in print, Mary Russell Mitford had heard (though it was probably an exaggeration) that HM had made more than £1,000 from those little eighteen-penny...
Publishing Elizabeth Barrett Browning
She did not show the poems to Browning until July of 1849; he persuaded her to include them in her next edition of Poems, saying I dared not reserve to myself, the finest sonnets...
Publishing Eleanor Anne Porden
EAP addressed a letter on the subject of Bread to the editor of the Sun in about 1817.
Porden, Eleanor Anne, and Edith M. Gell. “Letters: 1821-1824”. John Franklin’s Bride, John Murray, 1930, p. various pages.
16-17
She wrote remarkably honest and self-scrutinizing personal letters to John Franklin during their courtship. Edith Gell
Publishing Margaret Holford
In October 1830 Margaret Hodson, formerly Holford, was solicited by Baillie for contributions to the ongoing series of prose-and-verse miscellanies edited by M. Corbett and her five sisters. (The first volume, The Odd Volume...
politics Frances Trollope
Mary Russell Mitford later recalled that FTused to be such a Radical that her house in London was a perfect emporium of escaped state criminals. I remember asking her at one of her parties...
Other Life Event Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett 's dog Flush, a highly-valued companion given her by Mary Russell Mitford , was stolen and held for two days before being returned for a ransom of five guineas.
Forster, Margaret. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography. Grafton, 1990.
100, 117-18
Browning, Robert, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Brownings’ Correspondence. Editors Kelley, Philip et al., Wedgestone Press, 1984–2025, 14 vols. to date.
7: xii
Occupation Frances Arabella Rowden
FAR was clearly a key element, perhaps the key element, in the success of the Hans Place school. She taught the general curriculum there for nearly twenty-five years, from its founding until 1818, and she...
Occupation Fanny Kemble
Later in 1830, when she acted Calista in Nicholas Rowe 's The Fair Penitent, Thomas Noon Talfourd told Mary Russell Mitfordthat, at a distance from the stage, he could almost have imagined her...
Occupation Barbara Hofland
Mary Russell Mitford tells an amusing story of BH 's charitable philanthropy failing in its object. Hofland had been to great trouble and expense to help a starving male poet with a sick mother. She...
Occupation Sarah Tytler
As regards the typical feminine curriculum, ST resented the tradition of mandatory music teaching—of the piano—to young women, and the slight to other branches of education in the extravagant favour shown to one branch.
Tytler, Sarah. Three Generations. J. Murray, 1911.
235-6

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