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Mary Russell Mitford

February 16, 2024

For other people named Mary Russell, see Mary Russell (disambiguation).

Mary Russell Mitford (16 December 1787 – 10 January 1855) was an English author and dramatist. She was born at Alresford in Hampshire. She is best known for Our Village, a series of sketches of village scenes and vividly drawn characters based upon her life in Three Mile Cross near Reading in Berkshire.

Mary Russell Mitford, after Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1824

Childhood edit

She was the only daughter of George Mitford (or Midford), who apparently trained as a medical doctor, and Mary Russell, a descendant of the aristocratic Russell family. She grew up near Jane Austen and was an acquaintance of hers when young. At ten years old in 1797, young Mary Russell Mitford won her father a lottery ticket worth £20,000, but by the 1810s the small family suffered financial difficulties. In the 1800s and 1810s they lived in large properties in Reading and then Grazeley (in Sulhamstead Abbots parish), but, when the money was all gone after 1819, they lived on a small remnant of the doctor's lost fortune and the proceeds of his daughter's literary career. He is thought to have inspired Mary with the keen delight in incongruities, the lively sympathy, self-willed vigorous individuality, and tolerance which inspire so many of her sketches of character. She cared for her mother and father until their deaths and supported them and herself by proceeds from her writing.

From age 10 to 15 she attended a school in Hans Place, Knightsbridge, London, the successor to Reading Abbey Girls' School, which Austen had attended a few years earlier. Her father engaged Frances Arabella Rowden, formerly governess to the family of Frederick Ponsonby, 3rd Earl of Bessborough, to give her extra tuition. Rowden was not only a published poet, but according to Mitford, "she had a knack of making poetesses of her pupils".[1] Rowden took Mitford to Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, especially to plays featuring John Kemble, and entranced her with the life of the theatre.

Works edit

Mitford's youthful ambition had been to be the greatest English poetess, and her first publications were poems in the manner of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Walter Scott (Miscellaneous Verses, 1810, reviewed by Scott in the Quarterly; Christina, the Maid of the South Seas, a metrical tale based on the first news of discovery of the last surviving mutineer of the H. M. S. Bounty and a generation of British-Tahitian children on Pitcairn Island in 1811; and Blanche, part of a projected series of "Narrative Poems on the Female Character", in 1813). Her play Julian was produced at Covent Garden, with William Charles Macready in the title role, in 1823; Foscari at Covent Garden, with Charles Kemble as the hero, in 1826; while Rienzi, 1828, the best of her plays, ran for 34 performances, and Mitford's friend, Thomas Noon Talfourd, supposed that its popularity detracted from the success of his own play, Ion. Charles the First was refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain, but was played at the Surrey Theatre in 1834.

The prose, to which she was driven by the need to earn a living, was the most successful and financially rewarding of her literary productions. The first series of Our Village sketches appeared in book form in 1824 (having first appeared in The Lady's Magazine five years previously),[2] a second in 1826, a third in 1828, a fourth in 1830, a fifth in 1832. They were reprinted several times. Belford Regis, another series of literary sketches in which the neighbourhood and society of Reading were idealised, was published in 1835. Her description of village cricket in Our Village has been called "the first major prose on the game".[2]

Her Recollections of a Literary Life (1852) is a series of causeries about her favourite books. Her talk was said by her friends, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Hengist Horne, to have been even more amusing than her books, and five volumes of her Life and Letters, published in 1870 and 1872, show her to have been a delightful letter-writer. The many collections available of her letters provide especially useful commentary and criticism of her Romantic and Victorian literary contemporaries.

Reception edit

Mitford was a prolific and successful writer, though the quality of her prose has elicited mixed opinions. In his introduction to a 1997 reprint of selections from Our Village, Ronald Blythe stated that "it is hard to know what to praise most, her style or her spirit. Both rise to heights rarely found either in the women's journalism of her day or in a woman who by every law of the time should have been crushed by adversity."[3] On the other hand, Tom Fort, writing in 2017, took the view that "for a reader of today she is rather hard going ... She is, I'm sorry to say, trite, sentimental, long-winded, short-sighted, arch, chatty and twee."[4]

Esther Meynell's 1939 novel English Spinster: a portrait is a fictional treatment of the life of Mary Russell Mitford.[5]

Bibliography edit

  • 1810: Miscellaneous Poems[6]
  • 1811: Christina, the Maid of the South Seas (poetry)[6]
  • 1812: Watlington Hill[6]
  • 1812: Blanch of Castile
  • 1813: Narrative Poems on the Female Character[6]
  • 1823: Julian: A tragedy (play)[6]
  • 1824: Our Village, Volume 1 (Volume 2 1826; Volume 3, 1828; Volume 4, 1830; Volume 5, 1832)[6]
  • 1826: Foscari: A tragedy (play)[6]
  • 1827: Dramatic Scenes, Sonnets, and other Poems[6]
  • 1828: Rienzi: A tragedy in five acts (play)[6]
  • 1830: Editor, Stories of American Life, by American Writers, Volume 2
  • 1831: Mary Queen of Scots
  • 1831: American Stories for Little Boys and Girls (Editor)
  • 1832: Tales for Young People (Editor)
  • 1832: Lights and Shadows of American life (Editor)
  • 1834: Charles the First: An historical tragedy (play)[6]
  • 1835: Sadak and Kalascado
  • 1835: Belford Regis; or, Sketches of a Country Town (in three volumes)[6]
  • 1837: Country Stories[6]
  • 1852: Recollections of a Literary Life, or Books, Places and People (three volumes)[6]
  • 1854: Atherton, and Other Tales (three volumes)[7]
  • 1854: Dramatic Works[6]

Later life and death edit

Mitford met Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1836 and their acquaintance ripened into a warm friendship.

The strain of poverty told on Mitford's work, for although her books sold at high prices, her income did not keep pace with her father's extravagances. In 1837, however, she received a civil list pension, and five years later, on 11 December 1842, her father died. A subscription was raised to pay his debts, and the surplus increased Mary's income.

In 1851 she moved from Three Mile Cross to a cottage in Swallowfield, three miles away, where she remained for the rest of her life. She died there on 10 January 1855, after being injured in a carriage accident the previous December. She was buried there in the churchyard.

References edit

  1. ^ Crisafulli, Lilla Maria; Pietropoli, Cecilia, eds. (2008). The Languages of Performance in British Romanticism. Bern: Peter Lang. p. 301. ISBN 978-3-03911-097-1.
  2. ^ a b Swanton, E. W. (1980). Barclay's World of Cricket (2nd ed.). Collins. p. 582. ISBN 0-00-216349-7.
  3. ^ Blythe, Ronald (1997). Introduction. London: The Folio Society. pp. ix. In Our Village, Folio Society selections from the five-volume edition of Our Village by Mary Russell Mitford, published between 1824 and 1832.
  4. ^ Fort, Tom (2017). The Village News. London: Simon & Schuster. p. 321. ISBN 978-1-4711-5109-5.
  5. ^ Smith, F.S. (1953). What Shall I Read Next?: A Personal Selection of Twentieth Century English Books. Cambridge University Press. p. 92. ISBN 978-0-521-06492-7.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Cox, Michael, ed. (2004). The Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-860634-5.
  7. ^ Lee, Elizabeth (1894). "Mitford, Mary Russell (DNB00)" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 38. London: Smith, Elder & Co. p. 84.

Literature edit

  • The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, related in a Selection from her Letters, 3 vols (1870 Bentley).
  • Henry Fothergill Chorley (Ed.), Letters of Mary Russell Mitford (1872).
  • A.G.K. L'Estrange (Ed.), The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford as recorded in Letters from Her Literary Correspondents, 2 vols (1882 Hurst & Blackett).
  • William J. Roberts, (The Life and Friendships of) Mary Russell Mitford: The Tragedy of a Blue Stocking (Andrew Melrose, London 1913). (Modern publishing: Kessinger 2007, ISBN 0-548-60938-1)
  • M. Constance Hill, Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings (Bodley Head, London 1920).
  • Marjorie Astin, Mary Russell Mitford – Her Circle and Her Books (Noel Douglas, London 1930).
  • James E. Agate, Mary Russell Mitford (1940).
  • Vera G. Watson, Mary Russell Mitford (Evans Brothers, 1949).
  • Caroline Mary Duncan-Jones, Miss Mitford and Mr. Harness. Records of a Friendship. (S.P.C.K./Talbot Press, London 1955).
  • W.A. Coles, 'Mary Russell Mitford: the inauguration of a literary career', Journal of the John Rylands Library 40 (1957), 33–46.
  • Pamela Horn (Ed.), Life in a Country Town: Reading and Mary Russell Mitford (1787–1855) (Beacon Publications, Sutton Courtenay 1984).
  • Catherine Addison, 'Gender and Genre in Mary Russell Mitford's Christina,' English Studies in Africa 41, Part 2 (1998), 1–21.
  • Diego Saglia, 'Public and Private in Women's Romantic Poetry: Spaces, Gender, Genre in Mary Russell Mitford's Blanch,' Women's Writing 5.3 (1998), 405–19.
  • Martin Garrett, 'Mary Russell Mitford', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004.
  • Diego Saglia, 'Mediterranean Unrest: 1820s Verse Tragedies and Revolutions in the South,' Romanticism 11.1 (2005) 99–113.
  • Alison Booth, 'Revisiting the Homes and Haunts of Mary Russell Mitford', Nineteenth Century Contexts, 30 Part 1 (2008), 39–65.
  • Cecilia Pietropoli, 'The Story of the Foscaris, a Drama for Two Playwrights: Mary Mitford and Lord Byron,' in The Language of Performance in British Romanticism (Peter Lang, New York, 2008), 115–26.
  • Elisa Beshero-Bondar, 'Romancing the Pacific Isles Before Byron: Music, Sex, and Death in Mitford's Christina,' ELH 76.2 (Summer 2009) 277–308.

External links edit

  • Digital Mitford: The Mary Russell Mitford Archive This project is producing new digital editions of Mary Russell Mitford's correspondence and literary works, holds bibliographical listing of Mitford's writings, and lists locations of her manuscripts.
  • Works by Mary Russell Mitford at Project Gutenberg
  • Works by Mary Russell Mitford at Faded Page (Canada)
  • Works by or about Mary Russell Mitford at Internet Archive
  • Works by Mary Russell Mitford at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)  
  • "Archival material relating to Mary Russell Mitford". UK National Archives.  
  • Mary Russell Mitford Collection. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

February 16, 2024
mary, russell, mitford, other, people, named, mary, russell, mary, russell, disambiguation, december, 1787, january, 1855, english, author, dramatist, born, alresford, hampshire, best, known, village, series, sketches, village, scenes, vividly, drawn, characte. For other people named Mary Russell see Mary Russell disambiguation Mary Russell Mitford 16 December 1787 10 January 1855 was an English author and dramatist She was born at Alresford in Hampshire She is best known for Our Village a series of sketches of village scenes and vividly drawn characters based upon her life in Three Mile Cross near Reading in Berkshire Mary Russell Mitford after Benjamin Robert Haydon 1824 Contents 1 Childhood 2 Works 3 Reception 4 Bibliography 5 Later life and death 6 References 7 Literature 8 External linksChildhood editShe was the only daughter of George Mitford or Midford who apparently trained as a medical doctor and Mary Russell a descendant of the aristocratic Russell family She grew up near Jane Austen and was an acquaintance of hers when young At ten years old in 1797 young Mary Russell Mitford won her father a lottery ticket worth 20 000 but by the 1810s the small family suffered financial difficulties In the 1800s and 1810s they lived in large properties in Reading and then Grazeley in Sulhamstead Abbots parish but when the money was all gone after 1819 they lived on a small remnant of the doctor s lost fortune and the proceeds of his daughter s literary career He is thought to have inspired Mary with the keen delight in incongruities the lively sympathy self willed vigorous individuality and tolerance which inspire so many of her sketches of character She cared for her mother and father until their deaths and supported them and herself by proceeds from her writing From age 10 to 15 she attended a school in Hans Place Knightsbridge London the successor to Reading Abbey Girls School which Austen had attended a few years earlier Her father engaged Frances Arabella Rowden formerly governess to the family of Frederick Ponsonby 3rd Earl of Bessborough to give her extra tuition Rowden was not only a published poet but according to Mitford she had a knack of making poetesses of her pupils 1 Rowden took Mitford to Theatre Royal Drury Lane especially to plays featuring John Kemble and entranced her with the life of the theatre Works editMitford s youthful ambition had been to be the greatest English poetess and her first publications were poems in the manner of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Walter Scott Miscellaneous Verses 1810 reviewed by Scott in the Quarterly Christina the Maid of the South Seas a metrical tale based on the first news of discovery of the last surviving mutineer of the H M S Bounty and a generation of British Tahitian children on Pitcairn Island in 1811 and Blanche part of a projected series of Narrative Poems on the Female Character in 1813 Her play Julian was produced at Covent Garden with William Charles Macready in the title role in 1823 Foscari at Covent Garden with Charles Kemble as the hero in 1826 while Rienzi 1828 the best of her plays ran for 34 performances and Mitford s friend Thomas Noon Talfourd supposed that its popularity detracted from the success of his own play Ion Charles the First was refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain but was played at the Surrey Theatre in 1834 The prose to which she was driven by the need to earn a living was the most successful and financially rewarding of her literary productions The first series of Our Village sketches appeared in book form in 1824 having first appeared in The Lady s Magazine five years previously 2 a second in 1826 a third in 1828 a fourth in 1830 a fifth in 1832 They were reprinted several times Belford Regis another series of literary sketches in which the neighbourhood and society of Reading were idealised was published in 1835 Her description of village cricket in Our Village has been called the first major prose on the game 2 Her Recollections of a Literary Life 1852 is a series of causeries about her favourite books Her talk was said by her friends Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Hengist Horne to have been even more amusing than her books and five volumes of her Life and Letters published in 1870 and 1872 show her to have been a delightful letter writer The many collections available of her letters provide especially useful commentary and criticism of her Romantic and Victorian literary contemporaries Reception editMitford was a prolific and successful writer though the quality of her prose has elicited mixed opinions In his introduction to a 1997 reprint of selections from Our Village Ronald Blythe stated that it is hard to know what to praise most her style or her spirit Both rise to heights rarely found either in the women s journalism of her day or in a woman who by every law of the time should have been crushed by adversity 3 On the other hand Tom Fort writing in 2017 took the view that for a reader of today she is rather hard going She is I m sorry to say trite sentimental long winded short sighted arch chatty and twee 4 Esther Meynell s 1939 novel English Spinster a portrait is a fictional treatment of the life of Mary Russell Mitford 5 Bibliography edit1810 Miscellaneous Poems 6 1811 Christina the Maid of the South Seas poetry 6 1812 Watlington Hill 6 1812 Blanch of Castile 1813 Narrative Poems on the Female Character 6 1823 Julian A tragedy play 6 1824 Our Village Volume 1 Volume 2 1826 Volume 3 1828 Volume 4 1830 Volume 5 1832 6 1826 Foscari A tragedy play 6 1827 Dramatic Scenes Sonnets and other Poems 6 1828 Rienzi A tragedy in five acts play 6 1830 Editor Stories of American Life by American Writers Volume 2 1831 Mary Queen of Scots 1831 American Stories for Little Boys and Girls Editor 1832 Tales for Young People Editor 1832 Lights and Shadows of American life Editor 1834 Charles the First An historical tragedy play 6 1835 Sadak and Kalascado 1835 Belford Regis or Sketches of a Country Town in three volumes 6 1837 Country Stories 6 1852 Recollections of a Literary Life or Books Places and People three volumes 6 1854 Atherton and Other Tales three volumes 7 1854 Dramatic Works 6 Later life and death editMitford met Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1836 and their acquaintance ripened into a warm friendship The strain of poverty told on Mitford s work for although her books sold at high prices her income did not keep pace with her father s extravagances In 1837 however she received a civil list pension and five years later on 11 December 1842 her father died A subscription was raised to pay his debts and the surplus increased Mary s income In 1851 she moved from Three Mile Cross to a cottage in Swallowfield three miles away where she remained for the rest of her life She died there on 10 January 1855 after being injured in a carriage accident the previous December She was buried there in the churchyard References edit Crisafulli Lilla Maria Pietropoli Cecilia eds 2008 The Languages of Performance in British Romanticism Bern Peter Lang p 301 ISBN 978 3 03911 097 1 a b Swanton E W 1980 Barclay s World of Cricket 2nd ed Collins p 582 ISBN 0 00 216349 7 Blythe Ronald 1997 Introduction London The Folio Society pp ix In Our Village Folio Society selections from the five volume edition of Our Village by Mary Russell Mitford published between 1824 and 1832 Fort Tom 2017 The Village News London Simon amp Schuster p 321 ISBN 978 1 4711 5109 5 Smith F S 1953 What Shall I Read Next A Personal Selection of Twentieth Century English Books Cambridge University Press p 92 ISBN 978 0 521 06492 7 a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Cox Michael ed 2004 The Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 860634 5 Lee Elizabeth 1894 Mitford Mary Russell DNB00 In Lee Sidney ed Dictionary of National Biography Vol 38 London Smith Elder amp Co p 84 nbsp This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain Chisholm Hugh ed 1911 Mitford Mary Russell Encyclopaedia Britannica Vol 18 11th ed Cambridge University Press pp 619 620 Literature editThe Life of Mary Russell Mitford related in a Selection from her Letters 3 vols 1870 Bentley Henry Fothergill Chorley Ed Letters of Mary Russell Mitford 1872 A G K L Estrange Ed The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford as recorded in Letters from Her Literary Correspondents 2 vols 1882 Hurst amp Blackett William J Roberts The Life and Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford The Tragedy of a Blue Stocking Andrew Melrose London 1913 Modern publishing Kessinger 2007 ISBN 0 548 60938 1 M Constance Hill Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings Bodley Head London 1920 Marjorie Astin Mary Russell Mitford Her Circle and Her Books Noel Douglas London 1930 James E Agate Mary Russell Mitford 1940 Vera G Watson Mary Russell Mitford Evans Brothers 1949 Caroline Mary Duncan Jones Miss Mitford and Mr Harness Records of a Friendship S P C K Talbot Press London 1955 W A Coles Mary Russell Mitford the inauguration of a literary career Journal of the John Rylands Library 40 1957 33 46 Pamela Horn Ed Life in a Country Town Reading and Mary Russell Mitford 1787 1855 Beacon Publications Sutton Courtenay 1984 Catherine Addison Gender and Genre in Mary Russell Mitford s Christina English Studies in Africa 41 Part 2 1998 1 21 Diego Saglia Public and Private in Women s Romantic Poetry Spaces Gender Genre in Mary Russell Mitford s Blanch Women s Writing 5 3 1998 405 19 Martin Garrett Mary Russell Mitford Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004 Diego Saglia Mediterranean Unrest 1820s Verse Tragedies and Revolutions in the South Romanticism 11 1 2005 99 113 Alison Booth Revisiting the Homes and Haunts of Mary Russell Mitford Nineteenth Century Contexts 30 Part 1 2008 39 65 Cecilia Pietropoli The Story of the Foscaris a Drama for Two Playwrights Mary Mitford and Lord Byron in The Language of Performance in British Romanticism Peter Lang New York 2008 115 26 Elisa Beshero Bondar Romancing the Pacific Isles Before Byron Music Sex and Death in Mitford s Christina ELH 76 2 Summer 2009 277 308 External links editDigital Mitford The Mary Russell Mitford Archive This project is producing new digital editions of Mary Russell Mitford s correspondence and literary works holds bibliographical listing of Mitford s writings and lists locations of her manuscripts Works by Mary Russell Mitford at Project Gutenberg Works by Mary Russell Mitford at Faded Page Canada Works by or about Mary Russell Mitford at Internet Archive Works by Mary Russell Mitford at LibriVox public domain audiobooks nbsp Royal Berkshire History Mary Russell Mitford Bibliographical listing of commentaries Archival material relating to Mary Russell Mitford UK National Archives nbsp Mary Russell Mitford Collection General Collection Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Mary Russell Mitford amp oldid 1202400793, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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