Author: Jones, Anna Maria
Biography:
JONES, Anna Maria, formerly Shipley (1748-1829: ancestry.com)
Baptised on 5 Dec. 1748 at Silchester, Hampshire, she was the second child and eldest daughter of Jonathan Shipley, a senior clergyman in the Church of England, and his wife, Anna Maria (Mordaunt) Shipley. Educated by her father in classics and modern languages, she was surrounded in youth by social and intellectual elites. She and her sister, Georgiana, were members of the informal “Craven Street club,” bright young things who doted on their father’s friend the colonial genius Benjamin Franklin. At Wimbledon in the summer of 1766, she met attorney William Jones (q.v.). Sixteen years passed before he believed himself sufficiently well employed to propose to her, which he did in Oct. 1782. Their marriage took place the following year, on 8 Apr. at her father’s London residence in Bolton Street. Now “Lady Jones” (her husband having been knighted), four days later she was aboard the Indiaman Crocodile bound for Calcutta. The Indian environment proved toxic to her. Continuing illness drove her in Dec. 1793 to leave her husband behind while she returned to England. From then to the end of her life, she lived primarily in the countryside, at Worting House, near Basingstoke, Hampshire. In London, she had a residence in South Audley Street. In 1806, she adopted her deceased sister’s children, Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare; both boys became eminent clergymen. Her poems, flowery and faux-sentimental in the Della Cruscan manner, first appeared in the Asiatic Mirror and the Calcutta Morning Post. They were published in a collected edition in 1793. Her other literary activity was confined to editing her husband’s works (1799) and providing material for Lord Teignmouth’s Memoirs of Sir William Jones (1806). She died childless (save for her adopted boys) at South Audley Street on 6 July 1829 and was buried one week later at Twyford, Hampshire. Julius Hare officiated at her funeral. Maria Edgeworth left a memorable description of her in old age: she was a “thin, dried, tall old lady, nutcracker chin, penetrating, benevolent, often-smiling, black eyes.” The Royal Asiatic Society holds some of her sketches of Indian flora and fauna. (ancestry.com 28 Nov. 2023; Asiatic Journal 29 [1829], 253; F. A. B. Edgeworth, A Memoir of Maria Edgeworth: With a Selection of Her Letters [1867], 2:21; M. E. Gibson, Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagor [2011], 17-62) JC
Other Names:
- Anna Maria [Jones]