MITFORD, MARY RUSSELL

born Dec. 16, 1787, Alresford, Hampshire, Eng. died Jan. 10, 1855, Swallowfield, near Reading dramatist, poet, and essayist, chiefly remembered for her delightful sketches of English village life. She was the only daughter of George Mitford, a dashing, irresponsible character whose extravagance compelled the family, in 1820, to leave their house in Reading (built when Mary, at the age of 10, won 20,000 in a lottery) for a labourer's cottage in the nearby village of Three Mile Cross. Thereafter, until his death in 1842, his daughter struggled to provide for him and to pay his gambling debts out of her literary earnings. In 1810 she published Miscellaneous Poems, and other volumes of mildly romantic verse followed. Her narrative poem Christina (1811) was revised by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who inserted a number of lines. She then turned to the theatre, with some success, most notably in the blank-verse tragedy Rienzi, which had 34 performances at London's Drury Lane in 1828. Her reputation, however, rests on the sketches, started in The Ladies Magazine (1819), that fill the five volumes of Our Village. Based on her observation of life in and around Three Mile Cross, they catch the pleasant atmosphere of the English countryside and the quaintness of village characters.