Author: Darwall, Elizabeth
Biography:
DARWALL, Elizabeth (1776-1851: Messenger)
She was baptised on 7 Mar. 1776 at St. Matthew, Walsall, the daughter of the Rev. John Darwall (1731-89), Vicar of that place, and his second wife Mary Whateley Darwall (q.v.), who had married in 1766. She and her sister Harriet (1771-1840) contributed fourteen poems to their mother’s Poems on Several Occasions (1794). She also wrote "Journal, written during a hasty ramble to the Lakes," the ramble having been undertaken with female friends in Aug. 1796, which was published in the Monthly Magazine in 1800 (Aug., 11-16, Sept., 119-23). She published The Storm, with Other Poems (1810), which displayed a taste for sublime scenery and violent weather by no means original by 1810. In later life, probably after her mother’s death in 1825, she moved to Shrewsbury and lived with her niece Louisa Arrowsmith, who ran a school there at Belmont. She died on 5 Aug. 1851, aged 75, leaving an estate valued at less than £200 to a nephew, the Rev. Leicester Darwall. (Anne Messenger, Woman and Poet of the Eighteenth Century: the Life of Mary Whateley Darwall (1738-1825) [1999]; CCEd; Birmingham Journal 8 Dec. 1825; Shrewsbury Chronicle 8 Aug.1851; Rupert Sims, Bibliotheca Staffordiensis [1894] 131) AA