Barbarina Brand

Title page of Dramas, Translations, and Occasional Poems (1821)

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

She was the daughter of Admiral Sir Chaloner Ogle, 1st Baronet (died 1816), and Hester Thomas (daughter of John Thomas, Bishop of Winchester). In 1789 Barbarina 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, 20th 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.

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)

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.
• A Family Chronicle derived from Notes and Letters selected by Barbarina, the Hon. Lady Grey, edited by Gertrude Lyster. John Murray, Albemarle Street, London W. This correspondence claims that Barbarina Ogle was the daughter of Sawrey Gilpin, not Admiral Sir Chaloner Ogle.

Endnotes