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Scrittrici dimenticate:Mary Cholmondeley

Mary Cholmondeley (usually pronounced /ˈtʃʌmli/) was born at Hodnet, Market Drayton, Shropshire, as the third of the eight children of Rev. Richard Hugh Cholmondeley (1827–1910) and his wife Emily Beaumont (1831–1893). Her great-uncle was the hymn-writing bishop Reginald Heber and her niece the writer Stella Benson. An uncle, Reginald Cholmondeley of Condover Hall, who was host to the American novelist Mark Twain on his visits to England.^[1] Her sister Hester (died 1892) wrote poetry and kept a journal, selections of both appearing in Mary's family memoir, Under One Roof(1918).^[2]

After brief periods in Farnborough, Warwickshire and Leaton, Shropshire, the family moved back to Hodnet when her father was appointed rector there in 1874, in succession to his father. Much of the first thirty years of her life was taken up with helping her sickly mother run the household and her father with parish work, although she was herself debilitated with asthma. She also entertained her brothers and sisters with stories from an early age.^[3]

After her father retired as rector, she moved with him and her sister Diana in 1896 briefly to Condover Hall, which they had inherited from Reginald, and then sold it and moved to Albert Gate Mansions in Knightsbridge, London. After her father died, she lived with her sister Victoria, moving between Ufford, Suffolk, and 2 Leonard Place, Kensington. During the war she did clerical work in the Carlton House Terrace Hospital. They moved in 1919 to 4 Argyll Road, Kensington, where she died on 15 July 1925. She never married.^[4]