Mary Mitford was an English dramatist who is famous for a collection of 100 literary sketches of rural life 'Our Village'.
Background
Mary was born in Alresford, Hampshire, England, United Kingdom on December 16, 1787. Mary was the only daughter of Dr George Mitford, or Midford. She was born at Alresford, Hampshire, on the 16th of December 1787.
Her father was a curious character.
The father kept fresh in his daughter the keen delight in incongruities, the lively sympathy with self-willed vigorous individuality, and the womanly tolerance of its excess, which inspire so many of her sketches of character.
Career
In 1837 she received a civil list pension, and five years later her father died.
A subscription was raised to pay his debts, and the surplus increased the daughter's income.
Miss Mitford's youthful ambition had been to be " the greatest English poetess, " and her first publications were poems in the manner of Coleridge and Scott (Miscellaneous Verses, 1810, reviewed by Scott in the Quarterly; Christine, a metrical tale, 1811; Blanche, 1813).
Charles the First was refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain, but was played at the Surrey Theatre in 1834.
But the prose, to which she was driven by domestic necessities, has rarer qualities than her verse.
The first series of Our Village.
sketches appeared in 1824, a second in 1826, a third in 1828, a fourth in 1830, a fifth in 1832.
Her Recollections of a Literary Life (1852) is a series of causeries about her favourite books.
Her talk was said by her friends, Mrs Browning and Hengist Horne, to have been even more amusing than her books, and five volumes of her Life arid Letters, published in 1870 and 1872, show her to have been a delightful letter-writer.