Abstract
Although she was not old enough to have met George I, Mary Berry, Thackeray’s “lady,” knew everyone of renown, was a veritable London institution for decades, and lived to a very old age. Mary and her sister Agnes were born in 1763 and 1764 respectively and both died, aged nearly 90, in 1852. While the sisters were virtually inseparable, Mary, who was a prolific writer, an avid reader, an energetic hostess, a daring traveler, and a famous conversationalist, attracted her contemporaries’ attention, whereas Agnes, noted for her pencil drawings, remains shadowy. Despite the reputation she enjoyed during her lifetime, Mary Berry is little known today. Her learning firmly situates her in the intellectual traditions of the eighteenth-century bluestockings, some of whom, such as Hannah More, she had met in person. Her journals brim with descriptions of sociable encounters in London, Paris, Rome, Genoa, and elsewhere. While they retained a life-long connection with Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, the Berrys took residence in North Audley Street in Mayfair, an abode far less splendid than Devonshire House and other aristocratic houses they visited. However, their famous “drawing-room” continuously attracted the fashionable world, members of the bon ton, literati, actors, and politicians.
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Notes
William Thackeray, The Four Georges, in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, 24 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1879), 23: 5–116, here 5. For a very brief summary on the Berrys, see Susanne Schmid, “Holland House and Mary Berry’s Drawing-Room: Salons, Salonnières and Writers,” The Wordsworth Circle 35 (2004): 77–80, here 79–80.
On Walpole’s legacy see WL 11, xxvi-xxviii; Sarah Markham, “Mary Berry on the Death of Horace Walpole,” Notes and Queries 223 (1978): 65–67.
The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie, ed. Judith Bailey Slagle, 2 vols. (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press / London: Associated University Presses, 1999), 1: 156–157.
Sandra Adickes, The Social Quest: The Expanded Vision of Four Women Travelers in the Era of the Erench Revolution (New York: Lang, 1991), 127.
A selection of the correspondence between Walpole and Berry, based on the Yale edition, is Virginia Surtees, ed., The Grace of Friendship: Horace Walpole and the Misses Berry (Norwich: Michael Russell, 1995).
Theresa Lewis, Lives of the Friends and Contemporaries of Lord Chancellor Clarendon: Illustrative Portraits in His Gallery, 3 vols. (London: Murray, 1852).
The Berry Papers: Being the Correspondence Hitherto Unpublished of Mary and Agnes Berry (1763–1852), ed. Lewis Melville (London: Lane, 1914).
The Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. Kenneth Garlick, Angus MacIntyre, and Kathryn Cave, 16 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978–1984), 2: 571 (June 5, 1796).
Charles Pigott, The Female Jockey Club, or a Sketch of the Manners of the Age (London: Eaton, 1794), 202.
The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford, ed. Mary Berry, 5 vols. (London: Robinson and Edwards, 1798), reprint ed. Peter Sabor (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999).
Letters of the Marquise du Deffand to the Hon. Horace Walpole, ed. Mary Berry, 4 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1810).
Mary Berry, The Fashionable Friends; a Comedy, in Five Acts (London: Ridgway, 1802). References to The Two Martins are in JCB 2: 477, 501.
Mary Berry, A Comparative View of the Social Life of England and France, from the Restoration of Charles the Second to the French Revolution (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1828), and Social Life in England and France, from the French Revolution in 1789 to that of July 1830 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1831). On women and historiography see D. R. Woolf, “A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre, and Historical Knowledge in England, 1500–1800,” The American Historical Review 102 (1997): 645–679, here 649.
Mary Berry, Some Account of the Life of Rachael Wriothesley Lady Russell Followed by a Series of Letters (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819).
Benjamin Disraeli, Vivian Grey, ed. Michael Sanders (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004), 146.
Marcie Frank, “Horace Walpole’s Family Romances,” Modern Philology 100 (2003): 417–435.
George E. Haggerty, “The Strawberry Committee,” in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, ed. Michael Snodin, with the assistance of Cynthia Roman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 80–81. This catalogue accompanied the exhibition “Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill” at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) in 2010, providing comprehensive material on Walpole’s collections and his self-fashioning.
Jill Campbell, “‘I am No Giant’: Horace Walpole, Heterosexual Incest, and Love among Men,” The Eighteenth Century 39 (1998): 238–260, here 243.
Dianne S. Ames, “Strawberry Hill: Architecture of the ‘as if,’” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 8 (1979): 351–363.
Horace Walpole, Reminiscences Written by Mr Walpole in 1778 for the Amusement of Miss Mary and Miss Agnes Berry, ed. Paget Toynbee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924); for the catalogue and the dedication see JCB 1: 193.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Horace Mann,” Edinburgh Review 58 (October 1833), 227–258; her defense is printed in an 1840 edition of Walpole’s letters: M[ary] B[erry], “Advertisement to the Letters Addressed to the Miss Berrys,” in The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, ed. Mary Berry, 6 vols. (London: Bentley, 1840), 6: vii-xx.
William N. Free, “Walpole’s Letters: The Art of Being Graceful,” in The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Howard Anderson, Philip B. Daghlian, and Irvin Ehrenpreis (Lawrence: The University of Kansas Press, 1968), 165–185.
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Knopf, 1985), 15.
Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 273; on letters see also Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau, and Cécile Dauphin, Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).
Joanna Baillie, letter to [John Lewis] Mallet [?1842–1843], in Further Letters of Joanna Baillie, ed. Thomas McLean (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010), 220–221.
Richard D. Altick, “Mr. Cambridge Serenades the Berry Sisters,” Notes and Queries 183 (1942): 158–161.
Maggie Lane, Jane Austen and Food (London: Hambledon Press, 1995), 146.
Some publications give 1748 as the year of birth, but the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives it as 1749; Alison Yarrington, “Darner [neé Conway], Anne Seymour,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Percy Noble, Anne Seymour Damer: A Woman of Art and Fashion, 1748–1828 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Co., 1908), 75–83; see also Alison Yarrington, “The Female Pygmalion: Anne Seymour Darner, Allan Cunningham and the Writing of a Woman Sculptor’s Life,” The Sculpture Journal 1 (1997): 32–44; Susan Benforado, “Anne Darner (1748–1828), Sculptor,” unpubl. PhD thesis (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1986).
Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, 4th ed., 4 vols. (London: Dodsley, 1796), 4: xi–xii.
Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 91–124; Emma Donoghue, “’Random Shafts of Malice?’: The Outings of Anne Darner,” in Lesbian Dames: Sapphism in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. John C. Beynon and Caroline Gonda (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 127–146.
William Combe, The First Of April: or, The Triumphs of Folly (London: Bew, 1777).
Charles Pigott, The Whig Club: or, A Sketch of Modern Patriotism (London: Crosby, 1794), 91; see Donoghue, “Random Shafts of Malice?,” 140–141.
Jonathan David Gross, “Introduction,” in Anne Seymour Darner, Belmour: A Modern Edition (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), xvii–1, here xxxix, xxi. On “haunting” as part of the formulaic nature of Gothic, see Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 123.
My thanks go to The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, for providing me with a reproduction of this drawing, which is held there. The name “Cosway” is written underneath, yet it is no longer attributed to him. On Richard Cosway, who painted Darner several times, see Stephen Lloyd, Richard and Maria Cosway: Regency Artists of Taste and Fashion, with essays by Roy Porter and Aileen Ribeiro (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1995), 61, 117, 118, 122.
Emma Donoghue, Life Mask (Orlando: Harcourt, 2004). Donoghue makes very accurate use of eighteenth-century sources. See also Eibhear Walshe, “‘A Different Story to Tell’: The Historical Novel in Contemporary Irish Lesbian and Gay Writing,” in Facing the Other, ed. Borbála Faragó and Moynagh Sullivan (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 137–149. On same-sex desire and the bluestockings, see Susan S. Lanser, “Bluestocking Sapphism and the Economies of Desire,” in Reconsidering the Bluestockings, ed. Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg (San Marino: Huntington Library, 2003), 257–275.
A large body of recent criticism has opened the Romantic canon to include drama, especially women’s drama: Catherine Burroughs, ed., Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Catherine Burroughs, Closet Stages: JoannaBaillie andthe Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Thomas C. Crochunis, ed., Joanna Baillie: Romantic Dramatist; Critical Essays (London: Routledge, 2004); David Worrall, The Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 1787–1832: The Road to the Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Betsy Bolton, Women, Nationalism, and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Frederick Burwick, Playing to the Crowd: London Popular Theatre, 1780–1830 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). For two contrasting views on the status of women dramatists, especially Joanna Baillie, see Donkin’s and Cox’s articles: Ellen Donkin, “Joanna Baillie vs. the Termites Bellicosus,” in Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London, 1776–1829 (London: Routledge, 1995), 159–183; Jeffrey N. Cox, “Baillie, Siddons, Larpent: Gender, Power, and Politics in the Theatre of Romanticism,” in Burroughs, Women in British Romantic Theatre, 23–47, here 29. A good introductory survey is Gillian Russell, “Private Theatricals,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830, ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 191–203. This subchapter is also published as an article: Susanne Schmid, “Mary Berry’s Fashionable Friends (1801) on Stage,” The Wordsworth Circle 43(2012): 172–177. My thanks go The Wordsworth Circle for the permission to reproduce it.
Sybil Rosenfeld, Temples of Thespis: Some Private Theatres and Theatricals in England and Wales, 1700–1820 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1978).
Judith Bailey Slagle, “Sisters—Ambition and Compliance: The Case of Mary and Agnes Berry and Joanna and Agnes Baillie,” in Woman to Woman: Female Negotiations During the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Carolyn D. Williams, Angela Escott, and Louise Duckling (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010), 79–97.
Noble, Darner, 96–106; Andrew Elfenbein, “Lesbian Aestheticism on the Eighteenth-Century Stage,” Eighteenth-Century Life 25 (2001): 1–16.
Thomas McLean, “Introduction,” in Further Letters of Joanna Baillie, ed. McLean, 21–29, here 24; Joanna Baillie, “To the Reader,” in The Family Legend: A Tragedy, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Ballantyne & Co., 1810), v–xiii, here v.
Mrs. Cornwell Barron-Wilson, Memoirs of Miss Mellon, Afterwards Duchess of St. Albans, 2 vols. (London: Remington and Co, 1886), 1:243.
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© 2013 Susanne Schmid
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Schmid, S. (2013). Mary Berry and her British Spaces. In: British Literary Salons of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137063748_2
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