First profile:
HOARE, Mrs Mary Anne (née Pratt; also known as M.A. Hoare and Mrs Hoare), b. c.1818, d. Monkstown (County Cork) 1872. Story writer, MAH was the only child of John Pratt of Woburn Place, Cork, and Miss Hawkes of Bandon. In 1837 she married William Barry Hoare of Monkstown (Co. Cork), solicitor and attorney and brother of the antiquary Edward Hoare, at Glanmire (Co. Cork). The couple had six children, of whom three survived into adulthood. She may be identified with the M.A. Hoare, who published a poem 'After visiting Exeter Cathedral' in the Dublin University Magazine (April 1850, p. 434), and is known to have contributed to several London periodicals, including Sharpe's London Magazine (verse and prose), Temple Bar, Howitt's Journal, and many pieces to Household Words (1850-54). Several of her contributions to Household Words were repr. in Harper's (New York). She was an ardent admirer of the English author Mary Russell Mitford, with whom she corresponded.
Source: ‘Hoare, Mrs Mary Anne’, author entry, A Guide to Irish Fiction 1650-1900 edited by Rolf Loeber and Magda Loeber, with Anne Mullin Burnham, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004; electronic version created by An Foras Feasa, 2012 (http://www.lgif.ie, accessed 20 July 2014)
Second profile:
Irish author. Listed in Publishers' Circular, March 1 1851, as "Hoare (W.)". Lived, at least during early 1850s, in Monkstown, Co. Cork Contributed to Sharpe’s (verse and prose), to Howitt's Journal (at least one sketch), to H.W., and to other periodicals. In 1851 published Shamrock Leaves, her one book, a collection of some of her tales and sketches that had appeared in periodicals.
Mrs. Hoare "had from childhood been an ardent admirer" of Mary Russell Mitford's writings; in 1852 she began a correspondence with Miss Mitford that continued "till within a short period of Miss Mitford's death". In the second year of their correspondence, Miss Mitford wrote: "I do, indeed, adopt you, dearest Mrs. Hoare, as 'a friend upon paper'—a true and dear friend!" Shamrock Leaves, of which Mrs. Hoare sent Miss Mitford a copy, Miss Mitford thought a "painful book" for its depiction of the famine years in Ireland; but she found in it "unmistakable truth, a quality rare among ... the works of living Irish writers" (Life of Mary Russell Mitfordl III, 229n, 264, 238-239; Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford, p. 357).
Mrs. Hoare was apparently acquainted with Wills. In the Office Book, Wills recorded "A Suburban Romance" (December 14,1850) as by "W.H.W. (suggested by Mrs. Hoare)" with payment of £0.10.6 to Mrs. Hoare for the suggestion. In reprinting the story in his collection of his H.W. contributions, Old Leaves: Gathered from Household Words, Wills did not acknowledge Mrs. Hoare's suggestion (though in reprinting "To Clergymen in Difficulties", suggested to him by "facts derived from a correspondent", he did make such acknowledgment).
Mrs. Hoare's H.W. contributions were evidently much liked. Of the eighteen items, eleven were reprinted in Harper's, two of them acknowledged to H.W. One of her contributions, "Father and Son", was included in Choice Stories from Dickens' Household Words, pub. Auburn, N.Y.,1854.
Author: Anne Lohrli; © University of Toronto Press, 1971.
