Mary Russell Mitford and the aesthetics of geography

    Activity: Talk or presentation typesOral presentation

    Description

    Abstract: Mary Russell Mitford’s famous “Our Village” sketches were first published in the Lady’s Magazine and then the New Monthly Magazine over the course of the 1820s, before being published as a collection in volume form under the title Our Village. At a time when the London-based Lady’s Magazine was shifting towards a more centralised corporate model, Mitford’s sketches about village life (based on her home in Three Mile Cross, Berkshire, England) and their subsequent fame in both the UK and the USA, raise interesting questions about the geographical imaginary and periodical print culture. Specifically, Mitford makes considerable efforts to connect her village to a wider geographical imaginary via references to an array of visual and textual sources. Taking these references as its cue, this paper seeks to examine Mitford’s interest in art and literature as a method of interpreting geographical space, particularly in the context of her writings for the Lady’s Magazine and the New Monthly Magazine, and in relation to later periodical writing that drew on Mitford’s sketches as inspiration.
    Period16 Jul 2024
    Event titleThe 16th Annual Conference of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association: ‘Places and Spaces in Victorian Popular Literature and Culture’
    Event typeConference
    LocationCanterbury, United KingdomShow on map
    Degree of RecognitionInternational

    Keywords

    • victorian popular fiction
    • english literature
    • nineteenth-century
    • periodicals