Barbarina Brand

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Brand [née Ogle], Barbarina, Lady Dacre (1768–1854), was an English poet, playwright, and translator.

Barbarina was the daughter of Admiral Sir Chaloner Ogle, baronet (d. 1816), and Hester (née Thomas). In 1789 she married Valentine Henry Wilmot, an officer in the guards, though they later separated. The couple had one daughter, Arabella (1796–1839). After Wilmot's death in 1819 she married Thomas Brand, twentieth Baron Dacre (1774–1851), later that same year.

Educated at home, she became "one of the most accomplished women of her time"^[1]: in addition to her writing, she sculpted, rode, was proficient in both French and Italian, and maintained an extensive correspondence with a circle of other literary women, including Joanna Baillie, Mary Russell Mitford, and Catherine Maria Fanshawe.

Her final years were marred by the death of her daughter Arabella Sullivan in 1839, and by the loss of her hearing.

[edit] Published works

Dramas, Translations, and Occasional Poems (2 vols., privately printed in 1821), including

Gonzalvo of Cordova (1810, based on de Florian's Gonzalve de Cordone [1791])
Pedarias, a Tragic Drama (1811, based on Marmontel's Les Incas)
Ina, a tragedy in five acts (produced at Drury Lane in 1815 under Sheridan; printed the same year)
Xarifa (drama)

Forty-five pages of her translated sonnets were published in Ugo Foscolo's Essays on Petrarch (1823)
Editor, Recollections of a Chaperon by Arabella Sullivan (short stories, 1831)
Editor, Tales of the Peerage and Peasantry by Arabella Sullivan (short stories, 1835)
Translations from the Italian (privately printed in 1836)

[edit] References

"Dacre, Barbarina Brand." The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. Virginia Blain et al., eds. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1990. 259.
Cooper, Thompson. “Brand , Barbarina, Lady Dacre (1768–1854).” Rev. Rebecca Mills. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. 6 Jan. 2007.