Author: Linwood, Mary
Biography:
LINWOOD, Mary (1783-1862: ancestry.co.uk)
She was baptised on 3 Nov. 1783 at St. Philip’s, Birmingham, the eldest daughter of John Linwood and Susannah Cottrel who had married at Alvechurch, Worcester, in 1781. Following the bankruptcy of Matthew Linwood (Mary’s grandfather) in 1764, most of the family moved to Leicester where his wife, Hannah, opened a school at Belgrave Gate, assisted by her daughter Mary Linwood (1755-1845, ODNB), the celebrated embroideress. Mary and her sisters were educated there. She later recorded some of her experiences in her novel Leicestershire Tales (1808). After her poem The Anglo-Cambrian (1818), dedicated to the Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, she appears to have published little besides a few songs and an oratorio, David’s First Victory (1840), performed at Hanover Square rooms in London and other venues. She moved back to Birmingham and in 1851 she was living with her unmarried sister Sarah at 23 Hagley Road, Edgbaston, with both of them recorded as shareholders and annuitants. At some point after Sarah’s death in 1854, she moved to London. She signed her last work, the novel The House of Camelot (1858) from Bayswater, London. She died on 22 Oct. 1862 at 82 Westbourne Park, Bayswater, and was buried at St. Paul’s, Birmingham. She left an estate of around £2000. (Her grandmother, Hannah, had left her father, John, £1300, and her aunt had left an estate of around £45,000 in 1845, so the family had clearly recovered from the 1764 bankruptcy.) (ancestry.co.uk 15 May 2021; Leicestershire and Rutland Notes and Queries 1 [1891] 34-7; Atlas [London] 26 May, 9 June 1838; Morning Post 5 May 1840) AA
Other Names:
- M. Linwood