Blanche Warre-Cornish

Blanche Warre-Cornish (“Mrs Cornish”) (1844-1922) was an English conversationalist, celebrated for the “pregnant and startling irrelevancies”[1] of her discourse.

Family

She was the daughter of William Ritchie, the Advocate-General of Bengal, and the sister of Sir Richmond Ritchie. She married Francis Warre-Cornish, a master at Eton College and ultimately Vice-Provost of the school. They had a number of children, including the writer Mary MacCarthy.

Works

Mrs Cornish also wrote (for example, a memoir of Robert Hugh Benson[2]) and edited (for example, some biographical reminiscences of her cousin, William Thackeray), but was principally notable for her conversation, with which she engaged and occasionally alarmed generations of Eton schoolboys.

Some of her dicta were collected by Logan Pearsall Smith and privately published in 1935 as Cornishiana. A second edition was printed in Cairo by the Press of the Institut Francais d’Archeologie Orientale in 1947 and was re-printed in 1999 by Stone Trough Books.

She once gave the following advice to an assistant:

In all disagreeable circumstances remember the three things which I always say to myself: “I am an Englishwoman”; “I was born in wedlock”; “I am on dry land”.[3]

References

  1. ↑ per Logan Pearsall Smith, recorded in Bensoniana & Cornishiana (Stone Trough Books, Settrington, 1999), at page 43
  2. ↑ Memorials of Robert Hugh Benson (Burns & Oates, 1915), co-written with Shane Leslie
  3. ↑ Bensoniana & Cornishiana (Stone Trough Books, Settrington, 1999), at pages 51-52
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