Author: Dunsterville, Ann
Biography:
DUNSTERVILLE, Ann (fl 1807)
Her one published book was to have appeared in two volumes, with the subscription list printed in the second. For unknown reasons, just one volume was printed and so we lack the subscription list that might have contained clues to her identity. Two women of her name lived in Plymouth, Devon, at about this time. One was the daughter of Bartholomew and Joan Dunsterville; she was baptised on 18 May 1774 in St. Andrew’s church, Plymouth. She married Thomas Cleather, a widow and former mayor of Plymouth, on 15 Mar. 1805 meaning that by 1807, when Poems on Several Occasions was published, she had changed her surname. About the other woman even less information has been located but she was the daughter of Michael Dunsterville (1748-1821), a “gentleman” of Plymouth. He was likely a widower when he married Elizabeth Smith in 1793 in Exeter, Devon: Elizabeth could not have been Ann’s mother. Michael’s daughter, Ann, married a Swedish man, Charles Frederick Calissendorff, in Stoke Damerel, Plymouth, on 14 Jan. 1808. No further information has been found. Poems on Several Occasions includes verses identified as from an unpublished novel and an unpublished opera: Ann Dunsterville was ambitious if not very successful in her literary endeavours. (ancestry.co.uk 18 Aug. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 18 Aug. 2024)