[1] Maria Louisa Charlesworth was born 1 October 1819 at The Rectory, Blakenham Parva, Suffolk.
[2] As a visitor to the poor in her father's parishes from a young age, Maria drew on these experiences for her first book, The Female Visitor to the Poor (1846), as well as for her most popular publication, the fictionalised Ministering Children (1854) and its sequel published in 1867.
[3] It was especially popular as a 'Reward Book' for Sunday School prizes and was also translated into French, German and Swedish.
[4] In 1864 she retired to Nutfield in Surrey, where she lived at Church Hill House with her elderly mother who died in 1869.
She is credited with persuading the Reverend Francis Pocock, a former curate to the Bishop of Sierra Leone, to establish Monkton Combe School, near Bath, Somerset in 1868, to educate boys to become missionaries.