Maria and Harriet Falconar
Maria and Harriet Falconar were English or Scottish sisters who published joint collections of poems while in their teens in the late 1780s. They then disappeared from the historical record and little is known of their origins or later lives.[1]
Lives and authorship
Maria Falconar is stated to have been born in 1771 and Harriet in 1774. They may have been the daughters of Magnus Falconar, who published medical texts in the 1780s.
The sisters' joint volume of Poems appeared in 1788. The subscribers to the volume were headed by the Duke of Northumberland and included two Falconer names based in Nairn and Inverness. Elizabeth Carter, Catharine Macaulay and Helen Maria Williams were also among them. The poems were on such themes as Remorse and Fancy.[2][3]
Another volume about the ethics of
In 1791, aged 20 and 17, they authored a volume called Poetic Laurels, addressed to the Prince of Wales (later
Bibliography
- Maria and Harriet Falconar: Poems (1788)
- Maria and Harriet Falconar: Poems on Slavery (1788) text held in The British Library, shelfmark: 1164.e.23 http://www.brycchancarey.com/slavery/falconar.htm
- Maria and Harriet Falconar: Poetic Laurels (1791)
References
- ISBN 978-0-8476-7125-0.
- ^ ISBN 0192827758.
- ^ a b c Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy: The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present Day (London: Batsford, 1990), pp. 353.
External links
- Maria and Harriet Falconar at the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (ECPA)
- Women of History database, Catherine Russell. Accessed 2016
- A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland: Comprising Literary Memoirs and Anecdotes of Their Lives, and a Chronological Register of Their Publications, with the Number of Editions Printed; Including Notices of Some Foreign Writers Whose Works Have Been Occasionally Published in England Henry Colburn, 1816, p. 112
- Das gelehrte England, oder Lexikon der jetzlebenden Schriftsteller in Grosbritannien, Irland und Nord-Amerika, von Jahre 1770 bis 1790, David Reuss, 1791
- Bibliotheca Britannica, or a general index to British and foreign literature Authors [A - H], Volume 1, p. 354, 1824