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
Intertextuality and Influence Susanna Moodie
Critic Carl Ballstadt numbers Suffolk writers Thomas Harral and James Bird among SM 's most important influences. Her sketches are also indebted to Mary Russell Mitford , with whom she corresponded.
New, William H., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 99. Gale Research.
249
Textual Features Susanna Moodie
Roughing It in the Bush is a collection of sketches about a difficult adjustment to pioneer life in Canada, based on real incidents in SM 's life before her move to Belleville and embellished...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Montagu
The term bluestocking very quickly came to imply dismissiveness, if not actual disapproval and contempt. The first to use it pejoratively may well have been, as Gary Kelly has suggested, those who felt threatened or...
Textual Production Betty Miller
From this followed the commission to edit a volume of hithertoto unpublished letters from Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford .
Miller, Sarah, and Betty Miller. “Introduction”. On the Side of the Angels, Virago, p. vii - xviii.
xvi
The result was Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford: The Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett...
Textual Production Alice Meynell
She often used this column to address the works of literary women of the past. She judged Jane Austen inferior to Charlotte Brontë , accepting Brontë's opinion that Austen lacked what she, by implication, possessed:...
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...
Literary responses Harriet Martineau
HM later dated her release from pecuniary care from the huge, immediate success of this first number.
Martineau, Harriet, and Gaby Weiner. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography. Virago.
1: 178
The Athenæum, after hedging its bets for half of its brief paragraph, calling Martineau unimaginative...
Literary responses Harriet Martineau
Mary Russell Mitford wrote disapprovingly of HM 's claims: I see no good in these experiments.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
2: 281
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna 's pamphlet Mesmerism: A Letter to Miss Martineau, argued that if the account...
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
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Harriet Martineau
Writing to Mary Russell Mitford of her hope that they might meet, HM acknowledged the influence which the spirit of your writings has had over me.
L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, editor. The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford as Recorded in Letters from Her Literary Correspondents. Hurst and Blackett.
1: 263-4
Her reading included Shakespeare , Smollett ...
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...
Family and Intimate relationships Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
Respectable women had always shunned Blessington on account of her past; now her present too was publicly unacceptable. Her sister Ellen, now well married, dropped her.
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington,. “Introduction”. Conversations of Lord Byron, edited by Ernest J. Lovell, Princeton University Press, pp. 3-114.
80
Camilla Crosland later recalled how as an unmarried...
Intertextuality and Influence Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
The elderly lady, Lady Arabella, represents a chilly view of the English aristocracy. She opens her story with a paean in praise of past times and in dispraise of the present: How interminably long the...
Textual Production Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
This work involved her in finding—and engaging in voluminous correspondence with—contributors (who often were or became her personal friends), such as Anna Maria Hall , Felicia Hemans , Amelia Opie , Mary Russell Mitford ,...

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