Author: Murry, Ann
Biography:
MURRY, Ann (1750-1812: ancestry.co.uk)
She was baptised on 8 May 1750 at St. Mary-at-Hill, City of London, the youngest of twelve children of Isaac Murry (1700-78), wine-merchant, and his wife Elizabeth Parker (1711/12-85), who had married clandestinely in the Fleet prison in Mar. 1730/1. The family lived at Wapping New Stairs in the 1730s and 1740s before moving to 33 St Mary-at-Hill, Billingsgate, in the 1750s until about 1772. Thereafter they moved to 9 Love Lane, Eastcheap, until Isaac’s death in 1778. The family then moved to Tottenham High-Cross, from where Ann dated the preface to her collection of essays, Mentoria (1778), and where her mother died. (Mentoria went through many editions in her lifetime and afterwards before being syndicated for the eleventh edition of 1814.) In her Poems on Various Subjects(1779) Ann mentions four sisters: Eliza, Maria, Constantia, and Sarah. Her mother’s will of 1785 leaves her unspecified estate to be equally divided between her “four dear children”: Mary, Constance, Sarah and Ann. After her mother’s death Ann appears to have run a school with her sisters in Islington. The prefaces to The Sequel to Mentoria (1799) and Mentorian Lectures (1808) are both signed from there. An instructional religious work, A Concise History of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah (1783) was also published by Charles Dilly. However, An Abridgement of the History of France (1818) is almost certainly not hers and is a misattribution by library catalogues resulting in several sources giving her date of death as post-1818. The Abridgement is not likely to be hers as she is described on the title-page as “Mrs Murray, Author of Several Juvenile Works,” a description with three errors in it and a format Ann Murry never used. It was also not published by Charles Dilly or his successor Joseph Mawman. John Watkins (1816) incorrectly gave her date of birth as around 1755 but identified her father as a wine-merchant. Roger Lonsdale then correctly guessed the wine-merchant was Isaac Murry but followed Watkins and gave her death as post-1816. She was probably the Ann Murry who died at 1 Church Row, Islington, and was buried at St. Mary’s on 1 May 1812, aged 62. (ancestry.co.uk 11 Apr. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 11 Apr. 2022; London Metropolitan Archives: London Land Tax Records; London Directories; Watkins 246-7; Roger Lonsdale, ed., Eighteenth-Century Women Poets [1989], 357, 532) AA