Author: Starke, Mariana
Biography:
STARKE, Mariana (1762-1838: ODNB)
She was born and raised at Hylands House, Epsom, the elder daughter of Mary (Hughes) and Richard Starke. Her paternal great-grandfather had been a London merchant with an estate in Virginia, trading in tobacco and African slaves; her paternal grandfather lived and worked in India. Her father, born in Madras and employed by the East India Company, was deputy-governor of Fort St. David in 1752-6, this family association with India doubtless accounting for the setting of two of Starke’s plays, The Sword of Peace and The Widow of Malabar, the former first performed in 1788, the latter in 1790. From the late 1770s Starke’s literary endeavours received much encouragement from the writer William Hayley (q.v.), a family friend. Her first publication, a translation from French of a collection of comedies by Mme de Genlis, co-authored with her friend Millecent Parkhurst, was published anonymously as The Theatre of Education (1787). With the same publisher Starke in 1789 published The Poor Soldier, dedicated to and featuring her friend and patron Mrs. de Crespigny (q.v.). Rather than as a poet or playwright, it is as the author of a travel guide to continental Europe that Starke is famed. Evolving from a series of letters describing her experience of guiding her family’s travels in 1792-8 through France and Italy in search of health, it eventually became a work that contained details of everything Starke thought necessary to ensure mental stimulus and bodily comfort for the visitor to Italy and beyond. The work was first published as Letters from Italy (R. Phillips, 1800) but after the defeat of Napoleon re-opened Europe to travellers, a two-year sojourn on the Continent resulted in a revised edition, Travels on the Continent: Written for the Use and Particular Information of Travellers (John Murray, 1820). In Starke’s lifetime the work expanded over a further six editions. Although it eventually included travel information for as far afield as Russia and Scandinavia, Starke never herself travelled to these distant parts, revealing that, for instance, information on Russia was gathered from the Russian ambassadress at the Neapolitan Court. Murray was to base the travel guides for which the firm became renowned on Starke’s original idea. Starke divided her time between Exmouth and Italy, dying near Milan while journeying back to England. (ODNB 25 May 2023; womanandhersphere.com 25 May 2023; Orlando; ancestry.co.uk 25 May 2020) EC