Author: Andrews, Hannah
Biography:
ANDREWS, Hannah, formerly VARLEY (b 1780: ancestry.co.uk)
She was born on 17 Jan. 1780 at the Old Blue Post Tavern, Mare Street, Hackney, London, the daughter of Richard Varley (1751-91) and his second wife, Hannah Fleetwood (1750-1810)--although no marriage documents have been located. Her brothers John Varley (1778-1842), Cornelius Varley (1781-1873), and William Fleetwood Varley (1785-1856) became well-known landscape painters. Nothing is known of her education. She married Kenrick Andrews (1775-1855), watchmaker and later organist, musician, and piano-tuner, on 18 Jan. 1802 at St. Giles in the Fields, Holborn, London. They had three sons and three daughters between 1802 and 1817. After their marriage they lived at St. James’s Buildings, Clerkenwell, from where she published Miscellaneous Pieces in Verse (1805). It is of historic interest for her poem “Lines Occasioned by Reading Mrs. Wollstonecraft Godwin’s Wrongs of Women” and “On Seeing a Young Woman Who Had Drowned Herself. May 1798.” Other occasional poems record the death of a daughter, Hannah, on 9 Apr. 1805, and a visit to Mr. Rae’s Thatched House Academy in Islington. The list of subscribers includes various members of the Varley family, including Cornelius, and Fleetwood relatives. It is not known where or when she died. Many of the over 300 Varley family trees on Ancestry give her death as late July 1824 in Marylebone but this is improbable since the burial register records her as Hannah Varley. Women did sometimes revert to their maiden names but instances are rare and the Marylebone death requires explanation and corroboration. (ancestry.co.uk 7 Oct. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 7 Oct. 2024; ODNB [John Varley, Cornelius Varley, William Fleetwood Varley] 7 Oct. 2024) AA