Author: Wright, Mary Bestwick
Biography:
WRIGHT, Mary Bestwick (b 1806: findmypast.com)
The Cypress Wreath was obviously a vanity project, published by subscription with a small list of subscribers that includes several countesses and Right Honourable ladies. It is dedicated to the Duchess Dowager of Rutland and has an epigraph from Henry Kirke White (q.v.). In her preface the author describes her poems as “juvenile productions” written between the ages of 14 and 19 that she had been encouraged by friends to publish. They are trite occasional poems addressed to friends and family, sometimes by name; one of them commemorates the author’s schooling at “Mrs. G----‘s seminary,” which may have been in Boston, Lincolnshire. Presumably many of the subscribers had been the author’s schoolmates. The preface is dated from London but most of the subscribers came from provincial towns—Nottingham, Loughborough, Boston, Leicester, etc. Putting together internal clues and the subscribers’ list, it is possible to identify the author as Mary Wright, baptised at St. Mary’s, Nottingham, on 22 Dec. 1806, the third of eight children of Edward and Elizabeth (Bestwick) Wright, who had married on 1 Apr. 1799 at the same church. The family lived in Radford, Nottingham. At the time of the 1841 census, Elizabeth Wright was still living in Radford, on Gregory Street, with her two youngest (but adult) children, all of them reporting that they had independent means. Edward Wright, the father, had died and been buried at St. Mary’s either in 1820 or in 1828 (probably the latter, since there are no elegies for him among the poems but the title of his daughter’s book suggests bereavement). Mary almost certainly married at some point between 1828 and 1841, but it is not clear when and the name of her husband is not known. She does not appear to have published anything else. (findmypast.com 25 July 2024; ancestry.com 25 July 2024; Nottingham Journal 17 May 1828)