Margaret Holford

Margaret Holford (1778–1852) was an English poet and translator. Her most successful work was a historical verse romance, Wallace, or, The Fight of Falkirk (1809).

This article is about the writer (baptised 1778 – 1852). For her mother of the same name (1757–1834), see Margaret Holford (the elder).

Life

Her mother, also Margaret Holford (1757–1834) was likewise an author, and their works have sometimes been confused in bibliographies.[1] Her father, Allen Holford, died when Margaret Holford the younger was a child.[2] Margaret Holford was homeschooled and did not attend university.[2] Years after she received her education, she travelled to France and claimed that she was able to communicate with any of the locals who she spoke to her there.[2]

Holford was baptised on 1 June 1778 in Chester and married in 1826 Septimus Hodson (1768–1833), chaplain in ordinary to the Prince of Wales, who was then Anglican rector of Thrapston, Northamptonshire. She later wrote under her married name, Margaret Hodson. Robert Southey stayed for a week with the Hodsons in 1829. Among her close associates was Joanna Baillie.[3] Her husband died in 1833.[1] After her husband's death, she stayed with a Mrs. Lawrence, a woman who owned the estate of Studley Park in Ripon.[2] By 1835, Holford bought a cottage in Dawlish on the Devon Coast and remained there until her death in 1852.[2]

Career

The first published work of Margaret Holford the younger is thought to have been the two-volume Calaf, a Persian Tale, written when she was 17 and published anonymously about 1798.[2] Her most successful was a historical verse romance entitled Wallace, or, The Fight of Falkirk. Also published anonymously, it appeared in 1809, a year after Walter Scott's Marmion, which it is said to have "blatantly imitated."[1] Later romantic poems of hers included Margaret of Anjou and The Past. She also wrote a three-volume novel, Warbeck of Wolfstein, other poems, and a play that was never published or performed.[2]

The publication of Holford's novel First Impressions in 1800 compelled Jane Austen to change the title of her own novel to Pride and Prejudice.[4]

References
  1. Sutherland, Kathryn (2004). "Holford, Margaret (bap. 1778, d. 1852)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 20 June 2013. (subscription required)
  2. "Margaret Holford the Younger". Orlando Project. Retrieved 7 December 2014.
  3. Radcliffe, David. "Margaret Holford (1778-1852)". English Poetry 1579-1830: Spenser and the Tradition. Archived from the original on 8 January 2014. Retrieved 20 June 2013.
  4. Jane Austen Society of North America Retrieved 6 October 2016.


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