Author: Le Noir, Elizabeth Anne
Biography:
LE NOIR, Elizabeth Anne, formerly SMART (1754-1841: ODNB)
She was the younger daughter of Christopher Smart (q.v.) and his wife Anna Maria Carnan (1732-1809), born in London on 27 Oct. and baptised on 21 Nov. 1754 at St. Mary’s, Islington. Her mother was the step-daughter of the publisher John Newbery, who had published some of Christopher Smart’s writings; her maternal grandmother, and in course of time her mother also, inherited the Reading Mercury. The Carnans were Roman Catholics. After their father became incapacitated, Anna Maria Smart took charge of the education of Elizabeth and her sister Marianne, and sent them to a convent in France for three years (1763-6). They settled in Reading, Berkshire, where both sisters wrote occasionally for the Mercuryand eventually became owners. Marianne married Thomas Cowslade, an apprentice at the paper who succeeded to its management and passed the business on to their three sons. On 29 Jan. 1795 at the church of St. Lawrence, Reading, Elizabeth Smart married a French refugee who is named as St. Jean Baptiste Le Noir in the public record. There is some debate about his status: was he the Chevalier “de la Brosse,” with a small pension (ODNB), or a teacher of French who published schoolbooks and died in 1833? A “Miss Le Noir”—Marie Antoinette Le Noir—who published works for young ladies in French between 1798 and 1819 that were sometimes issued simultaneously in English by her London publisher and that are sometimes mistakenly attributed to Mrs. Le Noir, may have been related. The 1804 Promenades de Victorine (Victorine’s Excursions) is by the Frenchwoman. (Blain refers to her as a step-daughter; confirmation is lacking.) The Le Noirs had no children of their own but adopted Elizabeth’s niece and god-daughter Eleanora Cowslade (1793-1883), who became a partner in her boarding school. Mrs. Le Noir did not publish under her own name until she was fifty, but her works, combining prose and poetry in a distinctive way, had their admirers. She claimed also to have translated from French Meditations on the Gospel, but no copy has been traced. In 1830 she moved her school to Caversham Priory, outside Reading; she died there, aged 86, on 6 May 1841. (ODNB 17 Dec. 2023; ancestry.com 17 Dec. 2023; findmypast.com 17 Dec. 2023; Blain; Lewis Bettany, Edward Jerningham and his Friends [1919], 61n; MH 31 Jul. 1806) HJ
Other Names:
- Elizth. Anne Smart Le Noir
- Mrs. E. A. Le Noir
- Mrs. Le Noir