Dinah Mulock Craik 1826 – 1887
Author.
20 April 1826 – 12 October 1887
Education
Brampton House Academy.
Aged 13 left the Academy and helped her mother in her mother’s private school.
Attended the School of Design, Somerset House learning drawing.
Trained to be a governess.
Some Achievements and Interests
Wrote novels and childrens’ stories becoming a best-selling author. Many deal with challenges women faced and reflect the tension she felt between traditional values and lived experience. In her work she supported women to live independently and be self-sufficient.
Supported the Married Women’s Property Act believing that women should keep their own money, earned and inherited, and should be aware of their husband’s financial means to help control spending cf her novel A Brave Lady (Macmillan’s Magazine, 1869–70)
1871 Published Hannah about a man’s marriage with a deceased wife’s sister, an act illegal in England at that time.
1879 Published Young Mrs. Jardine which examined circumstances when a woman should be able to separate from a husband.
Issues
Father was a difficult man who abandoned his family.
Her mother died when she was 19 and her father stopped supporting the family.
Her two younger brothers died young.
Was a widely read author in her time but fell into obscurity after her death. She is now being reassessed.
Connection to Bloomsbury
Was living at 32 Hunter Street in 1847.
Researched and networked in the British Museum Reading Room in the 1840s.
Female networks
Friend of Elizabeth Gaskell, Frances Martin, Mona Caird.
Works
From 1846 her stories and poems began to appear regularly in popular magazines such as Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, Good Words, Sharpe’s London Magazine, Once a Week.
Include essays, translations, children’s stories and novels.
1849 The Ogilvies
1850 Olive
1851 The Half-Caste: An Old Governess’s Tale, Founded on Fact published in Chambers’s Papers for the People
1856 John Halifax Gentleman
1857 A Woman’s Thoughts about Women (published as essays in Chamber’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts). Published as a book 1858.
1859 Poems, her first book of verse
1859 Life for a Life.
1862 Mistress and Maid.
1867Two Marriages
1868 The Woman’s Kingdom
1875The Little Lame Prince and his Travelling Cloak, children’s book
Further reading
Chapter One. A Woman’s Image: The Writer and Her Public (victorianweb.org)