Mary Louisa Molesworth

For the Irish poet Mary Monck, née Molesworth, see Mary Monck.
Mary Louisa Molesworth
Born 29 May 1839
Rotterdam, South Holland, Netherlands
Died 20 January 1921 (aged 81)
London, England
Pen name Ennis Graham
Occupation Writer
Nationality English
Period 19th century
Genre Children's Literature

Mary Louisa Molesworth, née Stewart (29 May 1839 – 20 January 1921) was an English writer of children's stories who wrote for children under the name of Mrs Molesworth.[1] Her first novels, for adult readers, Lover and Husband (1869) to Cicely (1874), appeared under the pseudonym of Ennis Graham. Her name occasionally appears in print as M. L. S. Molesworth.[2]

Life

She was born in Rotterdam, a daughter of Charles Augustus Stewart (1809–1873) who later became a rich merchant in Manchester and his wife Agnes Janet Wilson (1810–1883). Mary had three brothers and two sisters. She was educated in Great Britain and Switzerland: much of her girlhood was spent in Manchester. In 1861 she married Major R. Molesworth, nephew of Viscount Molesworth; they legally separated in 1879.[3]

Mrs Molesworth is best known as a writer of books for the young, such as Tell Me a Story (1875), Carrots (1876), The Cuckoo Clock (1877), The Tapestry Room (1879), and A Christmas Child (1880). She has been called "the Jane Austen of the nursery," while The Carved Lions (1895) "is probably her masterpiece."[4] In the judgement of Roger Lancelyn Green:

Mary Louisa Molesworth typified late Victorian writing for girls. Aimed at girls too old for fairies and princesses but too young for Austen and the Brontës, books by Molesworth had their share of amusement, but they also had a good deal of moral instruction. The girls reading Molesworth would grow up to be mothers; thus, the books emphasized Victorian notions of duty and self-sacrifice.[5]

Typical of the time, her young child characters often use a lisping style, and words may be misspelt to represent children's speech—"jography" for geography, for instance.

She took an interest in supernatural fiction. In 1888, she published a collection of supernatural tales under the title Four Ghost Stories, and in 1896 a similar collection of six tales under the title Uncanny Stories. In addition to those, her volume Studies and Stories includes a ghost story entitled "Old Gervais" and her Summer Stories for Boys and Girls includes "Not exactly a ghost story."

A new edition of The Cuckoo Clock was published in 1914.

She died in 1921 and is buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.

References in other works

References

  1. ↑ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004).
  2. ↑ William Abbatt (1966). The colloquial who's who: an attempt to identify the many authors, writers and contributors who have used pen-names, initials, etc. (1600-1924). Pub. for University Microfilms Inc., Ann Arbor by Argonaut Press. p. 28. Retrieved 10 October 2012.
  3. ↑ Browning, D. C., comp. (1958) Everyman's Dictionary of Literary Biography; English & American. London: Dent; pp. 477-78
  4. ↑ Green, Roger Lancelyn, "The Golden Age of Children's Literature," in: Sheila Egoff, G. T. Stubbs, and L. F. Ashley, eds., Only Connect: Readings on Children's Literature, New York, Oxford University Press; second edition, 1980; pp. 9-10.
  5. ↑ Roger Lancelyn Green, Mrs Molesworth (Bodley Head, London, 1961)

Public Domain This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Further reading

External links