Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Martha Sherwood
-
Standard Name: Sherwood, Mary Martha
Birth Name: Mary Martha Butt
Married Name: Mary Martha Sherwood
Indexed Name: Mrs Sherwood
Pseudonym: A Young Lady
Pseudonym: The Author of The Traditions
MMSwrote and signed more than 350 books (mostly for children, but including several adult novels), and left almost a score of fat volumes of diary. Some of her children's books, despite their uncompromisingly hell-fire message, remained current for several generations and were vividly remembered by many impressionable children, some of whom grew up to be writers. Her former high repute as a children's writer is at least as well deserved for her autobiography and diary, and her biographer Naomi Royde-Smith
seriously admired some of her novels.
Royde-Smith, Naomi, and Denis Dighton. The State of Mind of Mrs. Sherwood. Macmillan, 1946.
This illustrated story of a young girl's childhood and education has some autobiographical elements (Howitt calls it her own early life),
qtd. in
Lee, Amice. Laurels & Rosemary: The Life of William and Mary Howitt. Oxford University Press, 1955.
188
including the profession of the army surgeon father of the eponymous character...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maria Callcott
MC
told her friend Caroline Fox
that she would write this book from memory without consulting sources. It may be relevant to her choice of title that Mary Martha Sherwood
had published a children's book...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriett Mozley
The month of the title is that of December, with Christmas in its midst. The story is one of family relationships among children: realistic, witty, and uncondescending. The issue of child nurture and education in...
Intertextuality and Influence
E. Nesbit
Wet Magic is a book full of legendary water creatures such as mermaids. It features a family of children tyrannised over by the unpleasant Aunt Enid (a contrast with other aunts whom EN
had presented...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Oliphant
The plot of the first novel concerns concealed family origin and loss of inheritance. Edgar Arden, brought up abroad, finds English social customs puzzling. MO
uses his visit to view a corpse as a means...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Fielding
The book's admirers included (perhaps embarrassingly) the courtesan Teresia Constantia Phillips
, who praised it in her Memoirs.
Catto, Susan J. Modest Ambition: The Influence of Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and the Ideal of Female Diffidence on Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, and Frances Brooke. University of Oxford, 1998.
72
Jane Collier
in her commonplace-book not only noted that Mrs Teachum has the Swift
ian...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
SFG
's importance to the influential Mary Wollstonecraft
can be gauged from the way that Wollstonecraft used and built on her writings, recommended them, measured others by their standard, and also did not hesitate to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Eliza Mary Hamilton
The first, Lines, On Seeing Again, After An Interval of Some Years, A Likeness of — is prefaced by an extract from Mary Martha Sherwood
's The Nun. The excerpt is meant to prepare...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Maria Tucker
As before, in 1857, she was influenced by the eighteenth-century writer Mary Martha Sherwood
, who had introduced Indian settings to children's literature.
Bratton, Jacqueline S. The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction. Croom Helm, 1981.
78
Cutt, Margaret Nancy. Ministering Angels: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Writing for Children. Five Owls Press, 1979.
81-2
Literary responses
Hester Mulso Chapone
Her brother John
wrote of the Praises that resound on all Sides following the publication of this book, though he regretted that reviewers, in praising the moral content, had ignored the literary style.
qtd. in
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon, 1990.
Mary Martha Sherwood
later recalled seeing everyone at a public assembly thrown into tears when the latter of these songs was sung.
Opie, Amelia. “Introduction”. The Collected Poems of Amelia Alderson Opie, edited by Shelley King and John B. Pierce, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. xxxvii - lxx.
xliii
Occupation
Frances Arabella Rowden
FAR
then returned to the St Quintin establishment, metamorphosed from a pupil into a Teacher. This was at about the time that St Quintin sold the school to pay his debts, but only to open...
Publishing
Camilla Crosland
Having aimed her earliest published book at young readers, CC
continued in this vein: her last publication for the young appeared more than three decades after her first. Her works for children include The Young...
Publishing
Elizabeth Rigby
In May 1843 ER
contributed again to the Quarterly Review, this time an anonymous review of Mary Martha Sherwood
in The Lady of the Manor—Evangelical Novels.
Houghton, Walter E., and Jean Harris Slingerland, editors. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900. University of Toronto Press, 1966–1989, 5 vols.
1: 725
The notice was retrospective: Sherwood's...
Reception
Lucy Walford
After the publication of Recollections of a Scottish NovelistLW
decided that there were still stories in her mind that rank among the great days of my life, yet which did not fit in with...
