The Inspiring Glass Half-Full Life of Mary Russell Mitford
I’m surprised the author Miss Mary Russell Mitford and her exciting, inspiring life story are not better known. A jackpot lottery win, riches to rags, becoming a best-selling novelist and mixing in impressive literary circles from her tiny village. A story of resilience and survival.
Born twelve years after Jane Austen in 1787, and having met her acquaintance, she was a fan of Austen’s work. She liked “to sit down in a country village in one of Austen’s most delicious books, quite sure before we leave it to become intimate with every spot and person it contains”.
Unlike Austen’s imaginary settings Russell Mitford placed her stories in Three Mile Cross near Reading where she lived for thirty one years.
They say ‘all of human life occurs in a village’ and Mary’s own life lived up to this by being pretty eventful. Her father was a physician who had social pretensions but was also a gambler. At ten years old in 1797, young Mary won her father a lottery ticket worth the huge sum of £20,000. She had been taken by her father into the lottery office on her tenth birthday and encouraged to buy a ticket as a present. She chose the number 2,224 because the numbers added up to ten. Some weeks later when the lottery was drawn in Dublin 2,224 was the winning ticket.
To raise himself to the status of country gentleman her father used this money and his wife’s fortune to build a large house. For a few years they were able to maintain this lifestyle until his debts caught up with them again and by 1819 all the money was gone and the estate sold. Faced with financial ruin Mary and her parents moved into a cottage in Three Mile Cross. Mary was to write later: “What a tearing up by the roots it was! I have pitied cabbage plants and celery and all transportable things ever since.”
Soon Mary came to love her new life though and with an optimistic temperament she threw herself into gardening in the cottage. However, even financial ruin failed to change Dr Mitford’s extravagant habits so Mary opted to try and support the family by writing. Her stories were an immediate success. She was adept at painting the picture of village life and describing what went on behind the curtains of the farmers, publicans, genteel ladies and shopkeepers. She was equally talented in her descriptions of the countryside: the frozen ponds, cricket on the common, the hoar frosts. Mitford wasn’t an idealist. She was aware of the harsher side of rural life and wrote with great compassion about the back breaking work and subsistence living. Her writing was so popular she was soon a contributor to The Ladies Magazine and she became one of the highest paid women writers of the day. You can’t help but think Austen would have been proud of her.
After the death of her mother Mitford was to become the primary carer for her still gambling father for the next twelve years until his death. Her life was hard and the money earned never enough to keep up with the debts but Mitford had some highlights in her life. In addition to Austen she got to meet Wordsworth and Browning and went on to form a deep and lasting friendship with Elizabeth Barrett.
After her father’s death in 1842 her own health began to fail and she became crippled with rheumatism. Being no longer able to go for her country walks she took to riding out in a pony chaise but was involved in an accident which saw her thrown from the chaise, injuring her spine. She was to spend the last two years of her life bedridden. The optimistic spirit which had seen her through up until this point was undimmed and she continued to entertain friends from the literary world, she carried on with her writing and also encouraged new young writers right up until she died.
I like the sound of Mary Russell Mitford. I hope one day she will get more of her share of the spotlight.
