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 Dinah Mulock Craik
Mary Russell Mitford supposed from reading this book that its author was Elizabeth Barrett Browning .
Athenæum. J. Lection.
(9 March 1872): 298
She may, however, have been building on another's opinion, for the Athenæum reviewer found abundant...
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 Jane Austen
Mary Russell Mitford found JA 's heroine pert and worldly.
qtd. in
Fergus, Jan. “The Professional Woman Writer”. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
20
Jane, Lady Davy (wife of the eminent scientist), who confessed that with an exception for Maria Edgeworth she preferred old favourites to new...
Literary responses Elizabeth Barrett Browning
EBB 's ballads have proved of particular interest to feminist critics. Dorothy Mermin argues that in this apparently most innocent, retrogressive, and sentimental of female genres, she was exploring what was to become her central...
Literary responses Anna Maria Hall
The sketches were popular with readers.
Sutherland, John, b. 1938. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.
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.
qtd. in
Butts, Dennis. Mistress of our Tears, A Literary and Bibliographical Study of Barbara Hofland. Scolar Press, 1992.
19
Apart from somewhat overvaluing Hofland, this...
Literary responses Joanna Baillie
The Chief Justice of Ceylon, Sir Alexander Johnstone , asked that two of JB 's last plays be translated into Singalese.One—The Bride, A Tragedy (published in summer 1828), had a Singalese subject.
Quarterly Review. J. Murray.
38 (1828): 602
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, 1870, 2 vols.
1: 364
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 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 Margaret Holford
Mary Russell Mitford called this novel an attempt to portray the poet Byron , recognisable through several anecdotes familiarly told about him, in very black and exaggerated colors. She maintained that Joanna Baillie , as...
Literary responses Anna Maria Bennett
Mary Russell Mitford read the Beggar Girl with delight as a schoolgirl in Chelsea, liking it not only for the character and the liveliness, but for the abundant story—incident toppling after incident; all sufficiently natural...
Literary responses Frances Trollope
Soon after its appearance Mary Russell Mitford heard this book reputed as clever, but not agreeable.
qtd. in
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, 1870, 2 vols.
2: 168
FT received stern reviews from the Times and The Spectator for representing genteel society as petty and...
Literary responses Felicia Hemans
Maria Jane Jewsbury had already begun the idealisation of FH in 1830 with her portrait of Egeria in The History of a Nonchalant: a muse, a grace, a variable child, a dependent woman—the Italy...
Literary responses Frances Trollope
Mary Russell Mitford spoke for the more conventional side of early nineteenth-century opinion when she wrote that in spite of her terrible coarseness, [she] has certainly done two or three marvelously clever things.
qtd. in
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, 1870, 2 vols.
2: 316

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