Hannah Mary Rathbone

Hannah Mary Rathbone (5 July 1798, in Shropshire – 26 March 1878, in Liverpool) was an English writer and the author of The Diary of Lady Willoughby.

In 1840 she made her first modest literary venture by publishing a collection of pieces in verse entitled Childhood, some of which were from her own hand; and in 1841 there followed Selections from the Poets.

Influenced by her father's tastes, she had read many histories and memoirs of the Civil war and adjacent periods, and her publisher (Thomas Longman) took great pride in bringing out the Diary as an exact reproduction of a book of the seventeenth century, in which it was supposed to be written.

[2][3] In 1847 Mrs. Rathbone issued a sequel under the title Some further Portions of the Diary of Lady Willoughby which do relate to her Domestic History and to the Events of the latter Years of the Reign of King Charles the First, the Protectorate, and the Revolution.

The general excellence of Mrs. Rathbone's workmanship, when she is at her best, becomes most clearly evident if Lady Willoughby's Diary is compared with Anne Manning's Life of Mary Powell (1850), which manifestly owed its origin to the success of the earlier work, but is altogether inferior to it.