Author: McMullan, Mary Anne
Biography:
MCMULLAN, Mary Anne (fl 1816-53)
McMullan was her married name. She was already a widow in 1816 when her first known works were published, The Crescent in verse (dedicated to the Prince Regent) and The Wanderings of a Goldfinch in prose (dedicated to Princess Mary). Subscribers to the latter included Amelia Opie and William Wordsworth (qq.v.). Reviewers were fairly scathing but she continued to write, no doubt out of necessity. Although she identifies her late husband as W. McMullan, MD, of the Royal Navy, no solid matches have been found in public records. That is perhaps because she was Irish and possibly also Roman Catholic. O’Donoghue includes her as a poet of Ireland but gives no biographical details. Her last known work was a collection of poems, Dioramic Sketches (1853). She might be the Mary Jellet who married “D. William Macmullen” in the diocese of Down, Connor, and Dromore in Ireland in 1804 and/or the Mary McMullan who was buried as a Roman Catholic in Dromore on 5 Apr. 1862, but corroboration is lacking and she appears to have spent most if not all of her adult life in England. She made many applications to the RLF between 1818 and 1853 and was awarded a total of £65. In 1818 she declared an annuity of £40 but was still granted £10 to meet pressing needs. In 1820 she had been working as a governess in a family that absconded without paying her. There do not appear to have been children, but at that stage she was the sole support of her mother and a disabled aunt; some of the men who wrote to support her applications observed that she had impoverished herself by assisting her family. In 1824 she wrote from the King’s Bench, where she had been imprisoned for a small debt incurred 20 years before. By 1840 she was living in Devon, and by 1853 in Cornwall. The date and place of death, however, are not known. (RLF #377; findmypast.com 8 May 2023; ancestry.com 8 May 2023; O’Donoghue; EN2; MR 35 [1818], 100; Literary Gazette [1817], 244)
Other Names:
- Mrs. McMullan