Maria Elizabetha Jacson

Although their sister, Anne (d. 1805) married, both Maria and Frances remained single, and looked after their father after he was widowed in 1795 and suffered from failing health till his death in 1808.

[1][3] Maria Jacson showed early signs of gifts in relation to botany, through drawing, horticulture and plant experiments.

Darwin describes a drawing she made in 1788 of a Venus fly-trap, stating that she was "a lady who adds much botanical knowledge to many other elegant acquirements".

Her publisher placed a commendation by both Darwin and Boothby ("so accurately explaining a difficult science in an easy and familiar manner")[6] amongst the prefaces to her first book, Botanical Dialogues (1797) written at the age of forty two, which was well received.

[1] She described the latter as follows "a complete elementary system, which may enable the student of whatever age to surmount those difficulties, which hitherto have too frequently impeded the perfect acquirement of this interesting science".

[13] Given the constraints on women writers of the times her books were published anonymously 'by a lady' but the introduction of Botanical Lectures is signed with the initials M.E.J.

[8] At the very end of the third edition (1827) of Florist's Manual, appear the words "Maria Elizabeth Jackson, Somersal Hall, Uttoxeter, Staffordshire.

[15] Her earlier writing was very much under the influence of Darwin,[2] however her Sketches of the Physiology of Vegetable Life (1811), marked a new independent direction, which she illustrated with her own drawings.

The world have agreed to condemn women to the exercise of their fingers, in preference to that of their heads; and a woman rarely does herself credit by coming forward as a literary character.