Mary E. Mann

Mary Elizabeth Mann, née Rackham, (14 August 1848 – 19 May 1929)Template:R was a celebrated English novelist in the 1890s and early 1900s.Template:R She also wrote short stories, primarily on themes of poverty and rural English life.Template:R As an author she was commonly known as Mary E. Mann.

Life

File:The ruin of St Bartholomew Heigham, Norwich (geograph 2103453).jpg

The church where Mann was baptised was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War. Only the tower now remains

Mary Rackham was born in Norwich to a merchant family on 14 August 1848.Template:RTemplate:RTemplate:R and she was baptised on 17 September in Heigham Parish Church in Norwich. Little is known about her early years, although Taylor states that she spent much of her childhood in the imposing family residence of Town Close House.Template:R

After her marriage on 28 September 1871 to Fairman Joseph Mann, a farmer with 800 acres, she moved to Shropham, Norfolk. Her husband was a churchwarden and A parish guardian; she also became involved with the workhouse, and visited the sick and other unfortunates of the parish, her observations and experiences informing her stories. Sutherland notes that lived in Norfolk her whole life, and wrote about the rural life in East Anglia that she knew so well.Template:R

She took up writing in the 1880s in order to relieve the tedium of daily life in what must have been, after her upbringing in Norwich, a remote and uninteresting country village.Template:R Her literary efforts were initially guided by Thomas Fairman Ordish, the son of her husband's sister, a literary-minded civil servant who became a notable Shakespearian scholar.Template:R Mann published her first novel, The Parish of Hilby (1883) at her own expense, probably on commission.Template:Refn and it was well received by the critics.Template:R Man refused an offer of £12 from the Family Herald to serialise the book.Template:R Kemp notes that her early fiction was published anonymously.Template:R

This began a career that spanned more than thirty years during which she published thirty three novels, hundreds of short stories, and fourteen plays, of which at least two were staged in London.Template:R Her work was largely focused on the experiences of rural life in Norfolk from labourers to yeoman farmers during the late 19th century agricultural and economic upheaval.Template:R

She had four children, one boy and three girls.Template:R After her husband's death in 1913, she moved to Sheringham, where she died aged 80. Her grave is in the churchyard of St Peter and St Paul, Shropham. Her grave-marker is a carved open book with the epitaph We bring our years to an end, as if it were a tale that is told.Template:R

Works

Shropham was renamed 'Dulditch' in her novels, reflecting her view of the village as isolated and bleak. She wrote Tales of Dulditch while living at Manor Farm which inspired her view of rural life during the early 20th century. Formerly regarded as a novelist belonging to the ‘earthy’ rural genre, her short stories in Tales of Victorian Norfolk are grim but authentic accounts of poverty and deprivation. Often described by some as Norfolk's Thomas Hardy, Mann was admired by D. H. Lawrence.Template:R

Novels include Mrs Day's Daughters, and The Patten Experiment (1899) where a group of well-meaning middle class folk try to live on a labourer's wage for a week.

Her work has recently been rediscovered as a major contributor to East Anglian literature, championed among others by A. S. Byatt, who in 1998 included her story Little Brother in The Oxford Book of English Short Stories.Template:R Byatt said that she had been introduced to Mann's writings by D. J. Taylor.Template:R Taylor suggests that this is one of the grimmest stories in Victorian fiction. In the story a mother gives the corpse of a still-birth boy to her living children to play with as a doll.Template:R Byatt calls the story plain, and brief, and clear and terrible though the narrator's tone is not simple. Byatt goes on to say that Mann is recording, not judging but her telling is spiky with morals and the inadequacy of morals.Template:R

Taylor, who wrote the entry for Mann in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in 2004, considers her best work to be not her novels but short fiction written in the 1890s such as Ben Pitcher's Elly, Dora o' the Ringolets and The Lost Housen, arguing them to be the equal of Hardy's but based on a matter-of-fact mood rather than Hardy's "vengeful determinism".Template:R These stories are collectively known as the Dulditch stories, and Taylor wrote a foreword to an anthology of thirty two of her Dulditch stories in 2008 as The Complete Tales of Dulditch.Template:R Taylor considers that it was Mann's first-hand observation of a community enmired in the 1880s agricultural depression that gives her best work its sheen.Template:R Richard King in The Tatler also considered that Mann was a writer whose greatest success lay in her short stories.Template:R The Scotsman said of her short stories that . . . Mann, has the talent of making her comedies, and tragedies complete and impressive within brief compass; and most of them have a touch of originality.Template:R

Mann's work can be grim and unpleasant. The Times notes that she did not shirk from showing the ugliness of life whether describing the rich or poor.Template:R Part of Mann's grimness come from her refusal to sugar-coat reality or ignore the most probable outcomes. The Scotsman said that Mann . . . never evades a logical conclusion. Her personages may not always suggest a very flattering view, of human nature, but such as they are, their fortunes are conducted with a scrupulous regard for probability, and there are no attempts to play tricks with the emotions of the reader, at the expense of his intelligence.Template:R The lost heir is a recurring trope in Victorian fiction. G. A. Henty had one of his heroes stolen as a toddler,Template:Refn and another lost to his father's familyTemplate:Refn but both acquire, through fortunate circumstances, the manners and polish of gentlemen, rather than being what one would expect from their upbringing in the workhouse or as fisher-lads. In contrast, when the lost child is discovered in Mann's The Victim (1917) the child is exactly what her experience of neglect, the workhouse, domestic service, and an unsatisfactory husband could be expected to make her, a foul-mouthed slattern.Template:R

Some of Mann's novels continue to be republished.Template:Refn In 2005 Eastern Angles Theatre Company used a collection of her characters and stories to create a new play A Dulditch Angel. It was directed by Orla O'Loughlin and written by Steven Canny.Template:R

Longer Works by Mann

The following list is based on searches at Jisc Library Hub Discover.Template:Refn The list is not necessarily exhaustive. Note that at the time of posting (12 August 2020) there are only two books by Mann on Project Gutenberg, whereas the British Library has eleven titles available online and the Hathi Trust ten, five of which are in common. The republication dates given in the notes are from.Template:R

Longer works by Mann

Ser	Year	Title	Publisher	Pages	Notes
1	1883	The parish of Hilby : a simple story of a quiet place	Elliot Stock, London	iv, 351 p., 8º	Template:Refn
2	1885	Confessions of a Coward and Coquette. Being the record of a short period of her life as told by herself.	Ward & Downey, London	303 p., 8º	Template:Refn
3	1886	Mrs. Peter Howard	Smith, Elder, London	2 v., 8º	Template:Refn
4	1889	A lost estate	Richard Bentley, London	3 v., 8º	Template:Refn
5	1890	One another's burdens	Richard Bentley & Son, London	3 v. ([6], 304; [6], 276; [6], 277, [3] p.), 8º	Template:Refn
6	1891	A winter's tale	R. Bentley & Son, London	2 v., 8º	Template:Refn
7	1893	Perdita	R. Bentley & Son, London	2 v., 8º	Template:Refn
8	1893	In Summer Shade	H. Henry & Co, London	3 v., 8º	Template:Refn
9	1895	Susannah	H. Henry & Co, London	viii. 403 p., 8º	Template:Refn
10	1896	There was once a Prince	H. Henry & Co, London	313 p., 8º	Template:Refn
11	1897	When Arnold comes home	Henry & Co, London	258 p., 8º	Template:Refn
12	1898	The Cedar star	Hutchinson and Co., London	vi. 347 p., 8º	Template:Refn
13	1899	Moonlight	T. Fisher Unwin, London	vii. 291 p., 8º	Template:Refn
14	1899	Out in Life's Rain	Hutchinson & Co, London	336 p., 8º	Template:Refn
15	1899	The Patten Experiment	T. Fisher Unwin, London	vii, 307 p., 8º	Template:Refn
16	1901	Among the Syringas	T. Fisher Unwin, London	vi. 297 p., 8º	Template:Refn
17	1901	The mating of a dove	T. Fisher Unwin, London	vi, 295 p., 8º
18	1902	Olivia's summer	Methuen, London	v. 300 p., 8º
19	1902	The fields of Dulditch	Digby, Long & Co., London	320 p., 8º	Template:Refn
20	1903	Gran'ma's Jane	Methuen, London	vii. 305 p., 8º	Template:Refn
21	1904	It Answered	'Daily Mail', London	ff. 12, 8º
22	1905	Fortune's Cap	Hurst & Blackett, London	315 p., 8º
23	1905	The Parish Nurse	Methuen & Co, London	309 p., 8º	Template:Refn
24	1906	Rose at Honeypot	Methuen & Co, London	vi, 308 p., 8º.	Template:Refn
25	1906	The Eglamore Portraits	Methuen & Co, London	v, 319 p., 8º	Template:Refn
26	1907	The memories of Ronald Love	Methuen & Co, London	vii, 312 p., 8º.	Template:Refn
27	1907	The sheep and the goats	Methuen & Co, London	8º.	Template:Refn
28	1908	A sheaf of corn	Methuen, London	vii, 312 p., 8º	Template:Refn
29	1908	The Heat-Smiter	Methuen & Co, London	305 p., 8º
30	1909	Avenging children	Methuen, London	vii. 310 p., 8º	Template:Refn
31	1910	Astray in Arcady	Methuen & Co, London	[4], 308, 31, [1] p., 8º., 8º
32	1910	Bound Together	Mills & Boon, London	v. 302 p., 8º	Template:Refn
33	1910	Little Mrs. Cummin. A comedy in three acts.	Samuel French, London	97 p., 1 p., 8º	Template:Refn
34	1910	The Visit. A play in one act.	Samuel French, London	24 p.	Template:Refn
35	1911	There was a Widow	Methuen & Co, London	vi. 309 p., 8º
36	1912	Men and Dreams	Mills & Boon, London	v. 312 p., 8º	Template:Refn
37	1913	Mrs. Day's daughters	Hodder & Stoughton, London	311 p., 8º	Template:Refn
38	1913	Through the window	Mills & Boon, London	319 p., 8º.	Template:Refn
39	1915	Grandpapa's granddaughter	Mills & Boon, London	vi, 296 p., 8º.	Template:Refn
40	1916	When a man marries	Hodder & Stoughton, London	319 p., 8º	Template:Refn
41	1917	The victim	Hodder & Stougton, London	320 p., 8º	Template:Refn
42	1918	The Pedlar's Pack	Mills & Boon, London	242 p., 8º	Template:Refn

External links

• Simple tales of country folk, DJ Taylor, The Independent, 7 October 2000
• Sinister tales of the countryside, Eastern Daily Press, May 18, 2001