Author: Rowden, Frances Arabella
Biography:
ROWDEN, Frances Arabella, afterwards Frances de St Quentin (1774-1832: ancestry.com)
Born in London on 22 Feb. 1774, she was a daughter of druggist Robert Rowden (d 1782) and his wife, Frances Pearce (1755-1828). She had twin brothers, Robert and Francis (b 1772), and three sisters, Julia (b 1777), Martha (1779-1874), and Sophia (1781-1858). She was baptized on 15 Mar. 1774 in St George’s church, Hanover Square, where her parents had married in 1772. At age eighteen, she entered a girls’ boarding school at Reading conducted by the former Miss Ann Catherine Pitts (d 1823) and her husband, Dominique de St Quentin (q.v.). Mary Russell Mitford, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emma Roberts, Lady Caroline Lamb (qq.v.), and Jane Austen were among the school’s several accomplished students. Upon her graduation, Rowden stayed on at Reading school as a teacher. The close relationship that developed between Frances and Dominique undoubtedly contributed to her decision to follow the St Quentins to London in 1794. There, she and they established a girls’ school at 22 Hans Place. Costs were shared: the St Quentins paid the insurance premiums, Rowden the property tax. In Jan 1809, when the St Quentins retired to 33 Hans Place, Rowden, assisted by her sister Julia, undertook sole management of the school. In 1818, she and Julia again uprooted their lives to follow the St Quentins, now to Paris. There the sisters set up a school in the rue d'Angoulême, later at le barrière de l’Étoile near the Champs-Elysées. Frances Anne Kemble (q.v.) was a pupil. After Ann died, in 1823, Frances and Dominque waited a respectable interval before marrying at Paris on 6 Apr. 1825. Her 1831 retirement to Marmoutier in Alsace was short lived. Following an eleven days’ illness, she died of cholera at Paris on 21 July 1832 (St James’s Chronicle, 26 July 1832). Besides her sisters, her uncle the reverend Francis Rowden and his sons, the reverends Francis and Edward Rowden, subscribed to her Poetical Introduction to the Study of Botany (1801). Other subscribers include her relative by marriage Mrs. Goodenough, and the earl and countess of Bessborough. The latter, apparently, were her sometime employers. (CCEd 21 June 2024; rowdensurname.org/pedigree 21 June 2024; National Archives MS HO 33/43/48; Sun Fire Office MS 11936; Reading Mercury, 18 Jan. 1779, 29 Nov. 1784, 9 Mar. 1789, 24 Jan. 1790, 5 Nov. 1792, 24 Feb. 1794; Galignani ’s Messenger, 18 Oct. 1823) JC