Maturin was descended from Huguenot émigrés who left France and found shelter in Ireland in the anti-Protestant persecution which followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in the late seventeenth century.

He lived in York Street with his father William, a Post Office official, and his mother, Fedelia Watson, and married on 7 October 1804 the acclaimed singer Henrietta Kingsbury.

[3] In January 1805, Maturin acted as a witness to a deed in which his father William signed a lease taking on a property on the south side of York Street, Dublin for 50 years from one "James Switsir of the City of Kilkenny".

[12] Financial success, however, eluded Maturin, as the play's run coincided with his father's unemployment and another relative's bankruptcy, both of them assisted by the fledgling writer.

Forced to support his wife and four children by writing (his salary as curate was £80-90 per annum, compared to the £1000 he made for Bertram), he switched back from playwright to novelist after a string of his plays met with failure.

A writer in the University Magazine was later to sum up his character as "eccentric almost to insanity and compounded of opposites – an insatiable reader of novels; an elegant preacher; an incessant dancer; a coxcomb in dress and manners.

[2] The periodical lamented the fact that Maturin had spent so much of his lifetime writing novels and plays and not enough time advancing the Protestant religion, "of which he was... so bright and so able an advocate".

This version was the source for the even more successful opera Il pirata, with a libretto by Felice Romani and music by Vincenzo Bellini, premiered at La Scala of Milan in 1827.

In Balzac's eyes, "this novel is taken up with the same idea to which we already owe the drama of Faust and out of which Lord Byron has cut his cloth since Manfred".

[17] A sister of Maturin's wife married Charles Elgee, whose daughter Jane Francesca became the mother of Oscar Wilde.

William Maturin (1803–1887), a Tractarian, was the Church of Ireland priest at Grangegorman and also librarian of Archbishop Marsh's Library, Dublin, from 1872 until 1887.