Mary E. Mann
Little is known about her early years, although Taylor states that she spent much of her childhood in the imposing family residence of Town Close House.
[5] She took up writing in the 1880s in order to relieve the tedium of daily life in what must have been, after her upbringing in Norwich, a remote and uninteresting country village.
[6] Her literary efforts were initially guided by Thomas Fairman Ordish, the son of her husband's sister, a literary-minded civil servant who became a notable Shakespearian scholar.
[2]: 5 Her work was largely focused on the experiences of rural life in Norfolk from labourers to yeoman farmers during the late 19th century agricultural and economic upheaval.
She wrote Tales of Dulditch while living at Manor Farm which inspired her view of rural life during the early 20th century.
Formerly regarded as a novelist belonging to the ‘earthy’ rural genre, her short stories in Tales of Victorian Norfolk are grim but authentic accounts of poverty and deprivation.
[12] Novels include Mrs Day's Daughters, and The Patten Experiment (1899) where a group of well-meaning middle class folk try to live on a labourer's wage for a week.
[13]: xix-xx Taylor, who wrote the entry for Mann in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in 2004, considers her best work to be not her novels but short fiction written in the 1890s such as Ben Pitcher's Elly, Dora o' the Ringolets and The Lost Housen, arguing them to be the equal of Hardy's but based on a matter-of-fact mood rather than Hardy's "vengeful determinism".
[14] Taylor considers that it was Mann's first-hand observation of a community enmired in the 1880s agricultural depression that gives her best work its sheen.
Her personages may not always suggest a very flattering view, of human nature, but such as they are, their fortunes are conducted with a scrupulous regard for probability, and there are no attempts to play tricks with the emotions of the reader, at the expense of his intelligence.
[note 5] In 2005 Eastern Angles Theatre Company used a collection of her characters and stories to create a new play A Dulditch Angel.
Note that at the time of posting (12 August 2020) there are only two books by Mann on Project Gutenberg, whereas the British Library has eleven titles available online and the Hathi Trust ten, five of which are in common.
