Author: Vardill, Anna Jane
Biography:
VARDILL, Anna Jane (1781-1852: ODNB)
Born 19 Nov. 1781 at 81 Norton Street, Portland Road, London, she was the only daughter of New York loyalist the Rev. Dr. John Vardill (1749-1811) and his wife, Agnes (1752-1826), the sole daughter of John Birtwhistle of Skipton-in-Craven, Yorkshire. Following his emigration to England, in 1791 her father succeeded the Rev. Charles Birtwhistle as rector of Skirbeck, Lincolnshire. In England, he spied on American agents and British supporters of American independence. She spent part of her early years in Gatehouse, a village in Fleet Galloway, Scotland, where she was tutored by a Frenchman, a Mr. Carmozin. Included in her juvenilia, Poems and Translations (1809; enlarged edn 1809; 3d edn 1816), is “The rights of women, a burlesque essay” in which she concludes that woman is prime minister, man is king. Except for Poems (“by a Lady”; dedicated, by permission, to Princess Charlotte) and The Pleasures of Human Life; a Poem (1812), she published pseudonymously, as “V.” She told her daughter that she published Poems to please her father, Pleasures to please her father’s friend the American grammarian Lindley Murray. To EM she contributed more than 200 tales and verses. Having heard Coleridge’s (q.v.) unpublished poem “Christabel” read by her friend Henry Crabb Robinson, she wrote Christobell, a Gothic Tale (first suggested as Vardill’s by Axon), printed in Apr. 1815 in EM. She was a member of the Attic Chest, a literary society, hosted in Berners Street by her friend Elizabeth Anne Porden (q.v.). The author Mary Russell Mitford (q.v.) was a close friend. At New Church, Marylebone, on 17 May 1822 she married the widow of “Mrs. Pince,” writer to the signet and agent of the Bank of Scotland James Niven (1770-1830) of Glenarm. They had a single surviving child, Agnes Vardill Niven (1825-1872. Following her husband’s death, she lived in Woolwich Common, London. She travelled to France and Italy in 1843, and again to France in 1845 and 1847. At the time of her death, at Skipton on 4 June 1852, she was resident in Reading, Berks. Her daughter Agnes’s estate was valued at probate under £35,000. (ODNB 3 July 2023; PROB 11/1709; 11/2100; W. E. A. Axon, “Anna Jane Vardill Niven the Authoress of ‘Christobell’,” Transactions Royal Society of Literature, 2d ser. 28:2 [1908], 58-88; The Vardill Society online 3 July 2023) JC