Author: Barker, Mary
Biography:
BARKER, Mary (1774-1853: ancestry.co.uk)
Artist, novelist, and poet. She was the daughter of Thomas Barker, an ironmaster, and his wife Mary Homfray and was baptised on 23 Sept. 1774 in Penkridge, Staffordshire. Her parents had married on 25 Nov. 1773. There are few certain details of her early years but she became the companion to an uncle, Sir Edward Littleton, who left her an annual income of £200 on his death in 1812. She published a novel, A Welsh Story, in 1798, and in 1800 she was in Portugal where she met Robert Southey (q.v.). He believed her to be very talented and, after her departure from Portugal, they exchanged letters; he wanted her to illustrate his Madoc. The Southeys visited her in Bristol, London, and Keswick and she was godmother to their first child, Margaret. In 1812 she moved to Greta Lodge, beside Southey’s home in Keswick, and became friendly with Coleridge and Wordsworth (qq.v.). She faced financial difficulties in 1819 and moved to Boulogne; she never returned to England. Southey met her for the last time on his trip to France in 1825. In 1830 she married Slade Smith who was many years her junior. She died in France in 1853 but no record has been located. (ancestry.co.uk 14 Nov. 2022; David Bradbury, Senhora Small Fry: Mary Barker and the Lake Poets [2003]; Lynda Pratt, Collected Letters of Robert Southey, online at romantic-circles.org/editions/southey_letters)