Anna Maria was educated in part by Frances Arabella Rowden, who was not only a poet, but, according to Mary Mitford, "had a knack of making poetesses of her pupils"[2] This ties Anna Maria to other of Rowden's pupils such as Rosina Doyle Wheeler, later Rosina Bulwer Lytton; Caroline Posonby, later Lady Caroline Lamb; the poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon ("L.E.L.

[4] Mrs Hall's first recorded contribution to literature is an Irish sketch called "Master Ben", which appeared in The Spirit and Manners of the Age, January 1829, pp.

To the New Monthly Magazine, which her husband was editing, she contributed Lights and Shadows of Irish Life, articles which were republished in three volumes in 1838.

The principal tale in this collection, "The Groves of Blarney", was dramatised with considerable success by the author, with the object of supplying a character for Tyrone Power, and ran for a whole season at the Adelphi in 1838.

In 1840, she issued what has been called the best of her novels, Marian, or a Young Maid's Fortunes, in which her knowledge of Irish character is again displayed in a style equal to anything written by Maria Edgeworth.

Her next work was a series of Stories of the Irish Peasantry, contributed to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, and afterwards published in a collected form.

[4] In The Art Journal, edited by her husband, she brought out "Pilgrimages to English Shrines" in 1849, and here the most beautiful of all her books, Midsummer Eve, a Fairy Tale of Love, was serialized.

[4] Hall's sketches of her native land bear a closer resemblance to the tales of Mary Russell Mitford than to the Irish stories of John Banim or Gerald Griffin.

She was instrumental in founding the Hospital for Consumption at Brompton (now the Royal Brompton Hospital), the Governesses' Institute (presumably the School Mistresses and Governesses’ Benevolent Institution), the Home for Decayed Gentlewomen (see Elizabeth Finn Care formerly the Distressed Gentlefolks' Aid Association), and the Nightingale Fund (used to set up what is now the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery).