Author: ROLFE, Ann
Biography:
ROLFE, Ann, formerly Button, afterwards Plumb (1788/89-1850: ancestry.com)
Her surname at birth was Button, she was related to the Buttons of Nayland, Suffolk, but her place of birth, birthdate, and parentage are unknown. On 9 June 1810, at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, in the church of St Mary, she married a widower, her senior by 42 years, schoolmaster Philip Plumb (d 1817). They lived for a time in South Green Cottage, Southwold. In 1813, she gave birth to the first of their two children, Sidney Waller Plumb (d 1831). At the time of his death, Sidney was a medical student at Kingston upon Thames. Her second child, William, in later life a carpenter, was born several months after the death of her first husband. On 24 Feb. 1818, she married, at Bury St Edmunds, another widower and schoolteacher Edward Rolfe, of Clare. There were no children by the marriage. She published her first book, Miscellaneous Poems for a Winter's Evening, at Colchester in Jan. 1824. The poet was especially proud of her (now rare) The Will; or, Twenty-one Years, published at Saxmundham, near Southwold, in 1828. She refers to The Will in several of her subsequent publications. In the 1830s and 1840s, she contributed poems to provincial newspapers, to The Ladies Pocket Magazine, The Ladies’ Mirror, and to Time’s Telescope. Thoughtful and intelligent, her poetry is superior to much provincial verse of the period. Having lived in the 1820s at Maldon, Essex, from about 1835 to the time of her death she and her husband lived at Selby House Farm, 66 Ham Common, near Richmond, where they conducted a girls’ school for about ten pupils. Her two novels appear to have been moderately successful. Her first, Choice and No Choice; or, The First of May, was published in May 1825; her second, an historical novel, Oath of Allegiance (with plates by Robert W. Buss) in Dec. 1847. She wrote the latter book “to aid one beloved son in his professional studies, and to recal (sic) another from a distant land.” Survived by her husband and her son William, the poet died at Selby House, aged 61, on 5 Aug. 1850. She was buried seven days later at All Saints Church in Kingston upon Thames. (ancestry.com 8 May 2024; Suffolk Chronicle 10 May 1817; Bury and Norwich Post 21 Aug. 1850; Mason’s Court Guide [1853], 82) JC