Author: Prowse, Marianne
Biography:
PROWSE, Marianne, formerly JEFFERY (1798-1850: findmypast.co.uk)
She was born Mary Ann on 20 Jan. 1798 at Teignmouth, Devon, the eldest daughter of William and Sarah Jeffery. Her sister Sarah Frances (1799-1869) later became a schoolmistress. On their visit to Teignmouth in Dec. 1817, George and Tom Keats took lodgings at 20 The Strand and became acquainted with Mrs. Jeffery and her daughters. The family extended various kindnesses to Tom Keats when he was ill and George Keats engaged in some mild flirtations with the two daughters, "steady, quiet Marianne and laughing thoughtless Sarah" as he called them (Rollins). John Keats (q.v.) joined his brothers in March 1818. Marianne wrote to Keats after he left but the letters have not survived. She may well have been the "P. Fenbank" who sent him a sonnet--"Star of high promise! not to this dark age"--and £25 in Nov. 1819. (The poem is included in her 1830 collection.) She married Isaac Sparke Prowse (1796-1843), a wine-merchant, on 21 June 1829 at Kenton, Devon. A son, William Jeffery Prowse, was born on 6 May 1836 in Torquay. He became a writer of comic verse. After the death of her husband in 1843, her sister and an uncle--John Sparke Prowse, shipbroker and notary public at Greenwich--helped to raise the boy. Several children did not survive, including her five-year-old daughter Mary Eliza, who died in 1835, possibly from typhus. She published a few poems in the Annuals and her only collection, published after her marriage, Poems (1830) contains a number of original and interesting poems on romantic themes and an early topographical Canadian poem, ‘The Burning of the Forest. A Tale of Miramichi. New Brunswick" on the fire which devastated the Canadian town in 1825. She died on 13 Jan. 1850 at Park Terrace, Torquay. (findmypast.co.uk 22 Sept. 2020; ancestry.co.uk 22 Sept. 2020; "Prowse, William Jeffery," ODNB 22 Sept. 2020; Hyder Rollins, "The Jeffreys [sic] of Teignmouth," The Letters of John Keats [1968] 1:78-80; Boyle 150; Exeter and Plymouth Gazette 9 Dec. 1843, 2 Feb. 1850, 27 Nov. 1852; GM Nov. 1850, 560) AA
Other Names:
- [Mrs.] I. S. Prowse