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Author: Roberts, Emma

Biography:

ROBERTS, Emma (1791-1840: ODNB)

Born in London 27 Mar. 1791, she was a daughter of Captain William Roberts (d Nov. 1811) and his wife, Eliza (Stephens) Roberts (d c. 1828), who married 23 Dec. 1783 in Saint Mary, Marylebone. She and her brother, William David (b 1785), were baptized in that church, as were her sisters, Emily (1787-1788) and Laura Henrietta (1789-1831). In the 1770s, her father served the Empress of Russia as aide-de-camp to military theorist Major General Henry Lloyd. He then was paymaster to the Essex Local Militia, in the 1790s, and paymaster from 1805 to the 2nd garrison regiment posted in Ireland. Her uncle David Roberts (q.v.) was a hero of the Peninsular War. Following her mother’s death, she set sail on 3 Feb. 1828 bound for India with her sister and her brother-in-law, Captain Robert Adair McNaghten (q.v.). When her sister died, she returned to London, in 1833, where she lived at 22 Hans Place with Letitia Landon (q.v.). She followed up her first known publication, a poem in Forget Me Not in 1826, with Memoirs of the Rival Houses of York and Lancaster, published in 1827. Essays, stories, and poems of hers appeared in 1827 and 1828 in the London Weekly Review and in annuals, The Amulet, The Bijou, the Literary Souvenir, and Friendship’s Offering. She contributed in 1830 to New Year’s Gift and La Belle Assemblée; to the English Annual in 1831; to the Asiatic Journal in 1832; and, in 1835, to Gems of Literature. In Sept. and Oct. 1839, she travelled overland with a single female companion to Bombay. In India, she contributed to Parbury’s Oriental Herald, to the Bombay United Service Gazette, and to the Oriental Observer. These works, and especially her prose books on India and the Himalayas, brought her brief renown. John Murray profited from her growing fame by paying her £315 to edit a new edition of Rundell’s Domestic Cookery (1840). Taken ill in Apr. at Satara, she died at Poona on 16 Sept. in the house of quartermaster Colonel Neil Campbell who, perhaps, was a relative of her friend Major Robert Calder Campbell (q.v.) HL attribute to her the 1819 poem Almegro, but without evidence. (ODNB 28 Feb. 2024; ancestry.com 28 Feb. 2024; NLS MS 42690; London Gazette 11-15 June 1805; Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 12 Nov. 1811; Bombay Gazette, 9 June, 22 and 27 July 1840) JC

 

Other Names:

  • Miss Roberts
 

Books written (5):

London: H. Hodson, Bohn, and Walker, 1819
Calcutta: for the author by Norman Grant, 1830
London: Edward Bull, 1832