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
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 Catherine Hutton
The Monthly Review found Dorothy too bold to be acceptable or indeed natural.
Constantine, Mary-Ann. “’The bounds of female reach’ Catherine Hutton’s Fiction and her Tours in Wales”. Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780-1840, issue 22.
But a couple of years after its publication, the painter Sir William Elford recommended The Welsh Mountaineer to his friend Mary Russell Mitford
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...
Literary responses Frances Arabella Rowden
Rowden's poem was reviewed by the Critical (3rd series 20 (May 1810): 112). Mary Russell Mitford read the first canto with high appreciation and admiration that increase[d] with every perusal. She expected it to rank...
Literary responses Jane Porter
Again her work was extremely popular. The French translation was banned by Napoleon because of its portrayal of nationalist resistance to conquest.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Mary Russell Mitford , who thought very highly of Porter, found Wallace in...
Literary responses Sarah Harriet Burney
The Critical review began predictably: The very name of Burney is sufficient to excite the most agreeable sensations in all the lovers of novel reading;
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
4th ser. 2 (1812) : 519
but it cited...
Literary responses Frances Trollope
Heineman claims reception was poor in England as well as America because the cultural climate in the former was beginning to resemble that of the latter; because of this, controls on women's behaviour were seen...
Literary responses Barbara Hofland
In the early 1820s BH seems to have been at the apex of her career. She was appreciated not only by her friend Mary Russell Mitford (who believed that nobody else could combine so much...
Literary responses Emma Robinson
The Athenæum's reviewer, Henry Fothergill Chorley , wrote that after Mary Russell Mitford 's characterization of Cromwell in her Charles the First, we know not who has conceived of the great General better...
Literary responses Frances Trollope
Soon after its appearance Mary Russell Mitford heard this book reputed as clever, but not agreeable.
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: 168
FT received stern reviews from the Times and The Spectator for representing genteel society as petty and...
Literary responses Anna Maria Hall
The sketches were popular with readers.
Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press.
A review in the Literary Gazette (yet more prone to read Irish stereotypes than Hall was to write them) called Sketches of Irish Characterthoroughly Irish, with all the...
Literary responses Barbara Hofland
Mary Russell Mitford wrote to BH , You are the mistress of our tears, as Miss Austen is of our smiles, and I think you have the advantage.
Butts, Dennis. Mistress of our Tears, A Literary and Bibliographical Study of Barbara Hofland. Scolar Press.
19
Apart from somewhat overvaluing Hofland, this...
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 Elizabeth Barrett Browning
In probably 1836, Mary Russell Mitford signalled her friendship for Lady Dacre by sendng her Barrett's Prometheus Bound and An Essay on Mind, with praise for her power of writing, the force, the fire...
Literary responses Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
Mary Russell Mitford , stuck fast in this novel within a month or two of its publication, called it that do-me-good piece of vulgarity.
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.
1: 364

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