Frances Browne

For those of a similar name, see Frances Brown (disambiguation).

Frances Browne
From the Family Collection of Selwyn Glynn Brisbane Australia
Born	(1816-01-16)16 January 1816 Stranorlar, County Donegal, Ireland
Died	21 August 1879(1879-08-21) (aged 63) Richmond, Surrey, England

Frances Browne (16 January 1816 – 21 August 1879) was an Irish poet and novelist, best remembered for her collection of short stories for children, Granny's Wonderful Chair.

Early life

She was born at Stranorlar, in County Donegal, Ireland, the seventh child in a family of twelve children. She was blind as a consequence of an attack of smallpox when she was 18 months old. In her writings, she recounts how she learned by heart the lessons which her brothers and sisters said aloud every evening, and how she bribed them to read to her by doing their chores. She then worked hard at memorising all that she had heard.

She composed her first poem, a version of "The Lord's Prayer", when she was seven years of age.

First publications

In 1841, Browne's first poems were published in the Irish Penny Journal and in the London Athenaeum. One included in the Irish Penny Journal was the lyric "Songs of Our Land", which can be found in anthologies of Irish patriotic verse. She published her first volume of poetry, The Star of Attéghéi, the Vision of Schwartz, and other Poems, in 1844.

Browne's first volume received mostly positive reviews. However, as Heather Tilley has noted, early commentary on Browne’s work was "characterized by its fascination with the way in which an individual with effectively no visual memory was able to become a writer and, moreover, a writer who could accurately convey visual concepts and images." The provincial newspapers, especially the Belfast-based Northern Whig, reprinted many of her poems, and she became widely known as 'The Blind Poetess of Ulster'. In December 1844, Prime Minister Robert Peel granted her an annual pension of twenty pounds.

In 1845, she made her first contribution to the popular magazine Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, for which she wrote for the next 25 years. The first story of hers published there, in March 1845, was "The Lost New Year's Gift", which tells of a poor dressmaker in London and exemplifies her story-telling abilities.

Emigration to Edinburgh and London

Illustration by Dora Curtis from 1913 edition of Granny's Wonderful Chair

In 1847, Browne left Donegal for Edinburgh with one of her sisters as her reader and amanuensis. She quickly established herself in literary circles and, in spite of health problems, wrote essays, reviews, stories, and poems. While in Edinburgh she published her second poetry collection, Lyrics and Miscellaneous Poems (1848), which she dedicated to Robert Peel. She also published a series of twelve "Legends of Ulster", which appeared between 1849 and 1851 in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine. Raymond Blair has argued that, while most of the legends “focus on the intervention of dark supernatural powers,” they also exhibit “sympathy for the oppressed” and especially for "disadvantaged young women.”

Browne regularly contributed short stories to magazines with a largely female readership, including a number to the Ladies' Companion, a magazine read by many well-to-do women of the Victorian era. Her earliest contribution, made when Jane Loudon was the magazine's editor, was "Barbara's Satin: A Tale of the Cumberland Peasantry" (April 13, 1850). Later contributions included the amusing "Mrs Sloper's Swan" (October 1853) and an eerie tale set in County Fermanagh, called "The Botheration of Ballymore" (April 1855).

In 1852, she moved to London. In 1856 her third volume of poetry appeared, Pictures and Songs of Home, which was directed at very young children and contains beautiful illustrations. The poems focus on her childhood experiences in County Donegal and provide evocative descriptions of its countryside. Her best known work, Granny's Wonderful Chair, was published the following year. A richly imaginative collection of fairy stories, it remains in print to this day and has been translated into several languages. She published her first novel, My Share of the World, in 1861. A second three-volume novel, The Castleford Case, quickly followed in 1862.

London and later life

In London, Browne wrote frequently for the Religious Tract Society's periodicals The Leisure Hour and The Sunday at Home. One of those in The Leisure Hour was "1776: a tale of the American War of Independence", which appeared on the centenary of that event in 1876. As well as describing some of the revolutionary events, it is a love story and beautifully illustrated. Her last piece of writing was a poem called "The Children's Day", which appeared in The Sunday at Home in 1879.

Frances Browne died on 21 August 1879 at 19 St John's Grove, Richmond upon Thames. She was buried in Richmond Cemetery on 25 August 1879.

Further reading

The most detailed biography is The Life and Works of Frances Browne by Patrick Bonar, self-published c. 2008. Raymond Blair edited an anthology of Browne's poems, short stories and essays: The Best of Frances Browne (Limavady: Rathmore Books, c. 2012).

Thomas McLean examines her longest poem, "The Star of Attéghéi", and its relationship to the war in Circassia in a 2012 monograph, The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Raymond Blair summarises and analyses five of Browne's "Legends of Ulster" in his 2008 Donegal Annual article "Frances Browne and the Legends of Ulster"

Browne's career is treated by Paul Marchbanks in Irish Women Writers: An A-to-Z Guide and by Linde Lunney in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, published under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy.

Works

• The Star of Attéghéi, the Vision of Schwartz, and other Poems. London: Edward Moxon, 1844.
• Lyrics and Miscellaneous Poems. Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox, 1848.
• The Ericksons. The Clever Boy; Or, Consider Another. Edinburgh: Paton and Ritchie, 1852.
• Pictures and Songs of Home. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, [nd, 1856].
• Granny's Wonderful Chair, and its Tales of Fairy Times. London: Griffith and Farran, 1857.
• Our Uncle the Traveller's Stories. London: W. Kent & Co., 1859.
• My Share of the World. 3 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1861.
• The Castleford Case. 3 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862.
• The Orphans of Elfholm, and Other Stories. London: Groombridge and Sons, [nd, 1862].
• The Hidden Sin. 3 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1866.
• The Exile's Trust, A Tale of the French Revolution, and other Stories. London: Leisure Hour, 1869.
• The Nearest Neighbour, and other Stories. London: The Religious Tract Society, [nd, 1875].

External links

• Works by Frances Browne at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Frances Browne at the Internet Archive
• Works by Frances Browne at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Granny's Wonderful Chair and Its Tales of Fairy Times, by Frances Browne, introduced and illustrated by Katharine Pyle. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1916.
• Granny's Wonderful Chair, by Frances Browne, illustrated by Florence White Williams. New York: The Saalfield Publishing Company, 1928; Illustration copyright not renewed.
• Bibliography of Frances Browne's works
• Frances Browne at Library of Congress, with 13 library catalogue records