Author: Hatfield, Sibella Elizabeth
Biography:
HATFIELD, Sibella Elizabeth, later MILES (1800-82: ODNB)
She was the daughter of Sibella (Starmar) and John Westby Hatfield, baptised at Falmouth, Cornwall, on 28 Sept. 1800. Her father was an auctioneer. Nothing is known of her education but she became a schoolmistress and was contributing poems to magazines and annuals by 1825. Her most ambitious work, The Wanderer in Scandinavia (1826), was published by subscription. Southey and Scott (qq.v.) were among the subscribers, as was the Cornish writer James Silk Buckingham (1786-1825), whose Oriental Herald gave it a long, friendly, but not uncritical review likening the “amiable and accomplished authoress” to Landon and Hemans (qq.v.). The next two books were more miscellaneous gatherings of short pieces in prose and verse. Hatfield, who had been running a boarding school at Penzance, left it when she married a naval commander and hydrographer, Alfred Miles (1796-1851), in Penzance on 13 Aug. 1833. They had two children. After a ten-year gap she started publishing again, using her married name, Mrs. Alfred Miles, but drawing on her established reputation as “formerly Miss S. E. Hatfield.” There was only one further volume of miscellaneous writings including verse, Leisure Evenings (1860), but there were essays and occasional poems. Later in life she moved to London, where she died at her home in Pimlico on 29 Mar. 1882. (ODNB 2 Mar. 2022; ancestry.com 2 Mar. 2022; Oriental Herald 11 [1826], 73-84, and 12 [1827], 333)