Mitford, Mary Russell (1787-1865), essayist, dramatist, and poet
“Clean, airy, orderly and affluent; well paved, well lighted and well watched; abounding in wide and spacious streets, filled with excellent shops and handsome houses - such is the outward appearance, the bodily form, of our market-town.” -
From Belford Regis (1835) a set of sketches based on Reading.
Born in Hampshire, she lived as a child in Coley in Reading from 1791-5, till her father’s gambling forced them to move away from Reading. At the age of ten, Mary won £20,000 in an Irish lottery allowing the family to move back to live at 39 London Road in Reading till 1804, when they moved to an expensive purpose built house in Grazeley. The reckless spending of her father, Dr George Mitford, compelled the family, in 1820, to move to a labourer's cottage in Three Mile Cross. After this Mary was obliged to use the high earnings from her writings to pay off her father’s debts and support him till he died in 1842.
In 1810 she published Miscellaneous Poems, and other volumes of romantic verse followed. Her narrative poem Christina (1811) was revised by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She turned to drama with some success in the 1820s, most notably in the blank-verse tragedy Rienzi, which had 34 performances at London's Drury Lane in 1828. She omitted having a Prologue and Epilogue to plays, an innovation that was followed by others. It was, however, her rural essays that she first started publishing in the Ladies Magazine in 1822 and went on being
published serially till 1832, which established her popularity in Britain. Later collected as the bestselling volumes of Our Village they won her a wider audience even becoming widely read in America. The essays are based on her observations of life in and around Three Mile Cross, they are pleasant descriptions of English rural life and village characters. Her work won her the friendship of many of the leading literary people of the day, such as Fanny Trollope, Harriet Martineau, including another local author Thomas Noon Talfourd, she also had an especial friendship with Elizabeth Barrett Browning with whom she had a long correspondence. She also wrote a similar set of sketches based on life in Reading called Belford Regis (1835) which captures much of the character of Reading as county town before Victorian industrialization. One of the most popular and well-respected writers of her time her works helped establish a growing sense of nostalgia for the rural life in nineteenth century England. Her cottage still stands in Three Mile Cross. Reading Local Studies Library has a special collection of her works and also some of her manuscript letters.
Link to the Dictionary of National Biography (only from a Library terminal).
Mary Mitford
Other External Links to more information:
Royal Berkshire History
- Biography of Mary Russell Mitford
Pictures from the National Portrait Gallery
Our Village: Online
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