Name Matilda Mackarness Role Novelist | Parents James Planche Books "Only", Coming Home | |
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Matilda Anne Mackarness (née Planché; 23 November 1825 – 6 May 1881) was an English novelist of the 19th century, primarily writing children's literature.
Contents
Biography
Matilda Anne Mackarness, born 23 November 1825, was the younger daughter of James Robinson Planché and of Elizabeth St. George. From an early age Miss Planché wrote novels and moral tales for children. As a novelist she took Dickens for her model and in 1845 she published Old Joliffe which was thought to be a satire of Dickens' 1844 Christmas story The Chimes. The following year she published A Sequel to Old Joliffe. In 1849 she published A Trap to Catch a Sunbeam, a brightly written little tale with a moral, and it is on this production that her reputation chiefly rests. It was composed some three years before the date of publication, had gone through forty-two editions, by 1882, and has been translated into many foreign languages, including Hindustani.
On 21 December 1852 Miss Planché married, at Holy Trinity Church, Brompton, the Rev. Henry S. Mackarness, brother of John Fielder Mackarness, bishop of Oxford, and of George R. Mackarness, bishop of Argyll and the Isles, and she thereupon settled at Dymchurch near Hythe, the first parish of which her husband had charge. They afterwards went to Ash-next-Sandwich, Kent, where Mackarness was vicar, until his death on 26 December 1868. He had left very slender provision for his widow and her seven children even though four others had died in infancy. Mrs. Mackarness lived then with her father first at Chelsea, and afterwards at Clapham. In spite of ill-health she continued writing till her death on 6 May 1881 at Margate. She was buried beside her husband in Ash churchyard. She possessed considerable musical talent.
Works
Besides the books already mentioned she wrote:
She also contributed to the Magnet Stories (1860–2), wrote a collection of Ballad Stories for the Girl's Own Paper, edited The Young Lady's Book (1876), and edited and contributed several stories to a publication called Lights and Shadows (1879). Some of her tales were collected and published as the Sunbeam Series.