Author: Hoole, Barbara
Biography:
HOOLE, Barbara, formerly WREAKS, later HOFLAND (1770-1844: ODNB)
She was baptised in Sheffield, Yorkshire, on 16 Feb. 1770, the eldest child of Barbara (Clark) and Robert Wreaks, who had married on 16 Feb. 1769 at Watermillock, Cumberland. Her father was an ironmonger in Sheffield; after his death in 1773 her mother carried on the business but the partnership was dissolved in 1781 and she remarried in 1782, at which point Barbara went to live with an aunt. In 1794 she began to contribute poems to the Sheffield Iris, under the editorship of James Montgomery (q.v.), who encouraged her and printed some of her later work. She married Thomas Bradshaw Hoole, a merchant, in 1796, and they had a son, Frederic(k) Parkin Hoole (1798-1833), but she was left almost penniless at her husband’s death in 1799 and took to writing for a living. Her Poems (1805), with a lengthy subscription list, sold well; she also began writing improving fiction—“tales”--for young people, which were widely read. In 1809 she opened a school in Harrogate, Yorks., the site of her later satires. At Knaresbrough on 28 Jan. 1810, however, she married a landscape artist, Thomas Christopher Hofland (1777-1843), and they moved to London. Both struggled to earn a living but found supporters and developed a circle of literary and artistic friends. She continued to write poems, tales, schoolbooks, adult fiction, and articles for periodicals; by 1829 she had published more than twenty novels. She also accepted and raised her husband’s illegitimate son Thomas Richard Hofland, who became her heir after she died at home at Richmond-on-Thames on 4 Nov. 1844. (ODNB 19 Oct. 2022 [under Hofland]; findmypast.com 19 Oct. 2022; EN2)
Other Names:
- Mrs. B. Hoole
- Barbara Hofland