Anna Maria Chetwood was the author of at least two anonymously-published novels published in the 1820s. She was also not the author of at least two anonymously-published novels published in the 1820s.

Despite my efforts to confirm either one of these statements, she remains for me Schroedinger’s novelist.

There are layers and chains of contradictory evidence relating to the authorship of Blue-Stocking Hall (1827) and Tales of My Time (1829). Both of these enormously long novels were published anonymously, but despite the fact that contemporary reviewers indicated that they knew the author was a woman, the books were quickly attributed to the pen of English Unitarian minister and writer William Pitt Scargill. This assumption stuck for decades.

I was aware that Rolf and Magda Loeber concluded in 1998 that Anna Maria Chetwood was the author of both works.[1] When I came across a reference to Blue-Stocking Hall in Martha Wilmot’s letters from Vienna, written less than two months after the book’s publication, it seemed to me that this was conclusive evidence of Chetwood’s authorship. But as I began to search further and dig deeper, it became clear that the authorship of these novels may never be firmly established. I published a detailed review of the evidence in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy.

Evidence in Wilmot and Chetwood family private papers, together with research in the archives of Colburn and Bentley’s publishing house demonstrated to me that although there is a case for Chetwood’s authorship, there is also evidence that suggests the author may have been her sister-in-law Alicia Wilmot.

So what was the outcome of my in-depth research into two massive, long-forgotten novels of the 1820s? First of all, the novels were almost certainly written by an Irish-born woman, possibly while living in England. They therefore constitute part of the Irish literary diaspora and their themes show how Irish romanticism both differed from and intersected with British romanticism. Secondly, my research involved detailed reconstruction of both Chetwood and Wilmot’s biographies, which were previously virtually unknown. This led to my revision of Chetwood’s entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography. Chetwood was also a poet; this aspect of her life will be the topic of a future post.

While few leisurely readers would attempt either of the novels today – each comes in a weighty three volumes and 900-odd pages – Maria Edgeworth approved of Blue Stocking Hall, writing, ‘notwithstanding its horrid title, I have read a great deal of it; and I thought that there was a great deal of good, and of good sense in it’.[2]

This research was supported by an Anna Parnell Travel Grant from the Women’s History Association of Ireland.

[1] Rolf Loeber and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber, Irish 18th–19th Century Fiction Newsletter 1 (privately published, January 1998); Rolf Loeber and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber, A guide to Irish fiction 1650–1900 (Dublin, 2004), pp. 268–70.  

[2] Maria Edgeworth to Mrs Ruxton, 12 Apr. 1829, in Maria Edgeworth, A memoir of Maria Edgeworth, with a selection from her letters by the late Mrs Edgeworth, edited by her children (3 vols, London, 1967), vol. III, p. 31.