Author: Strickland, Agnes
Biography:
STRICKLAND, Agnes (1796-1874: ODNB)
The second eldest of six surviving daughters and two sons born to Thomas Strickland, a dock manager, and his second wife Elizabeth Homer, she was born in Kent on 19 Aug. 1796. Susanna and Catharine Parr Strickland (qq.v.) were her sisters. She was educated at home by her father who in 1808 purchased Reydon Hall near Southwold in Suffolk. Even before he died in 1818 there were financial difficulties and after his death five of the daughters turned to writing to supplement the family income. Agnes began her prolific literary career by publishing verse in periodicals, two collections of children’s stories (1824 and 1826), and two collections of poems. (Later books that include verse are Floral Sketches, Fables, and Other Poems [1836] and Historic Scenes and Poetic Fancies [1850].) Her three-volume historical romance, The Pilgrims of Walsingham, appeared in 1835 and Alda, the British Captive in 1841. In the early 1830s she and her elder sister, Elizabeth, began writing biographies of the queens of England. The sisters were scholarly in their approach and undertook research in the British Museum. Although Elizabeth wrote many of the entries, they agreed that only Agnes’s name would appear on the title pages of the resulting ten-volume set issued by Henry Colburn (1840-48); the books were popular and made Agnes famous. She had a lifelong interest in Mary Queen of Scots and, with the help of Sir Robert Ker Porter (brother of Anna Maria Porter, q.v.), had access to transcripts of Mary’s letters held in the Imperial Library in St. Petersburg. Translations of these were issued with The Lives of the Queens of England. In 1844 the sisters travelled to France where they met François Guizot and Jules Michelot; they also conducted research in French archives. Elizabeth and Agnes wrote Lives of the Queens of Scotland (1850-59); it was followed in 1861 by Lives of the Bachelor Kings of England. After their mother’s death in 1864, the sisters sold Reydon Hall and Agnes moved to Park Lane Cottage, Southwold, where she embraced new projects: The Tudor Princesses (1868) and The Stuart Princesses (1872) were among her final works. In 1870 she was granted a civil list pension of £100. An injury in 1872 was followed by a stroke and, having never really recovered, she died on 13 July 1874 at home. She was buried in the churchyard of St. Edmund, Southwold. (ODNB 11 July 2022; WorldCat; ancestry.co.uk 11 July 2022) SR