Mary Cowden Clarke
English Writer
1809 – 1898 A.D.

Mary Cowden Clarke, an English writer. She was the daughter of the composer and organist Vincent Novello, and in her youth frequently met Shelley, Coleridge, Charles and Mary Lamb, Keats, Leigh Hung, Hazlitt and other literary celebrities of the day, to whose influence may be attributed the early development of her intellectual powers.

In her fifteenth year she was a contributor to the magazines. In 1828 she was married to Charles Cowden Clarke, and soon commenced the Concordance to Shakespeare, with which her name is so honorably connected.

This work, after sixteen years of uninterrupted labor, was published in London in 1846, in a large octavo of 860 pages. Her services to Shakespearean literature by this standard work was widely acknowledged; and among the tokens of appreciation bestowed upon her was a memorial from America, consisting of a chair ornamented with small figures of tragedy and comedy carved from the Shakespeare mulberry tree, and with a copy of the Stratford bust of the great dramatist.

Nearly every state in the Union sent contributions to the gift. Mrs. Clarke was also the author of many novels, essays, etc.

~*~

Reference: Famous Women; An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women By Joseph Adelman. Copyright, 1926 by Ellis M. Lonow Company.