Marian Andrews

Title

Marian Andrews

Full Name

Andrews, Marian [née Hare] (1839–1929)

Pseudonym

Christophere Hare

Lifespan

1839–1929

Marian Andrews 1891 census records

Place of origin

London

Eastbourne

Country of origin

England, United Kingdom

Language

English

Italian

Occupation

Novelist

Short story writer

Historical author

Biographer

Travel writer

Member of learned society

Founder of a Dante Society in Eastbourne.

Short biography

Marian Andrews was born at 1 Pelham Place, Brompton, London, on 24 February 1839, the eldest child in the family of four daughters and four sons of the political reformer Thomas Hare (1806–1891) and his wife Mary, née Samson (d. 1855). Marian Hare’s early homes were in Pelham Place, Brompton, and Chestnut Cottage at Ham in Surrey, before the family settled at Gosbury Hill, Hook, Surrey. Her father was a barrister, best known for his support for proportional representation and his close friendship with John Stuart Mill.

Like her sisters, Marian Hare was educated at home.

On 26 November 1861, she married the Revd William Ryton Andrews (1834–1922). Her husband was a significant amateur geomorphologist, who was a fellow of the Geological Society and published three articles on local geology in their Quarterly Journal (1881, 1891, 1894). He was also an enthusiastic member of the Geologists’ Association.

While living in Hastings, Marian Andrews was a signatory to the women’s suffrage petition presented to parliament by J. S. Mill in June 1866.

Marian Andrews wrote extensively under the pseudonym Christopher Hare. Her first publications were inspired by her surroundings in rural Wiltshire. The Life Story of Dinah Kellow (1901) was a collection of moving short stories describing the lives of the population of Combe Dalland, clearly modelled on her husband’s parish, and reflecting her understanding of the lives of rural labourers. The descriptions of the interiors of cottages, understanding of folk customs, and details of the local workhouse suggest her involvement in her husband’s pastoral work. Literary influences included Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, and Charlotte Mary Yonge. Andrews’s tales of rural life were well-received: her first collection, Down the Village Street: Scenes in a West Country Hamlet (1896), was described as ‘gracefully and tenderly pathetic’ by one reviewer (The Graphic, 8 Aug 1896).

The larger part of Marian Andrews’s extensive publications, however, comprised historical and biographical works dealing with fifteenth- and sixteenth-century figures, often female, demonstrating—in the age of the suffrage campaigns—her serious commitment to the recovery of the historical experience of women.

Significant biographies of royal and aristocratic women included The Most Illustrious Ladies of the Italian Renaissance (1904), A Queen of Queens, and the Making of Spain (1906)—a laudatory biography of Isabella of Castile which dealt uncomfortably with her support for the Spanish Inquisition—and lives of Isabella of Milan (1911) and Guilia Gonzaga (1912). Her work most closely resembles that of Julia Cartwright Ady (1851–1924), who wrote substantial biographies of Isabella and Beatrice d’Este (1903, 1899), recovering their cultural and political role in Renaissance Italy.

She travelled annually to Italy. She travelled annually to Italy, and in her most striking work, Dante the Wayfarer (1905), she explored the Italian towns in which the exiled poet took refuge, and the lives of many of the contemporary figures he included in The Divine Comedy, translating substantial passages from the poem. She was among many significant women popularizers of Dante’s life and work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often supporting a reading of the poet as a proto-protestant critic of the Catholic church. Indeed, Andrews’s urge to find sympathizers with protestant reform in late medieval and Renaissance Italy is particularly apparent in her Men and Women of the Italian Reformation (1914), where Dante was joined by Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, and Savonarola.

In later life Marian Andrews and her husband moved to Eastbourne, Sussex. She was the founder of a Dante Society in Eastbourne. She was widowed in March 1922, and on 29 March 1929 she died at her home, 27 Enys Road, Eastbourne. The couple had been cared for by their unmarried daughter, Marian Elizabeth Andrews (1881–1977), who was a painter and sculptor under the name of Elsie Andrews. £14,061 5s.6d.: probate, 4 May 1930,
CGPLA Eng. & Wale

Reproduced from Rosemary Mitchell, OXDNB entry.

Selected List of Publications

Biographies and historical texts

(1904). The Most Illustrious Ladies of the Italian Renaissance. London. Harper & Brothers.

(1905). Dante the Wayfarer. London. Harper & Brothers.

Dante the Wayfarer

(1907). Courts & Camps of the Italian Renaissance: being a Mirror of the Life and Times of the Ideal Gentleman Count Baldassare Castiglione. London. Harper & Brothers.
(1910). The Romance of a Medici warrior: being the Story of Giovanni delle Bande Nere. A Study in Heredity. London. Paul.
(1911). Isabella of Milan, Princess d'Aragona, and wife of Duke Gian Galeazzo Sforza. London. Harper & Brothers.
(1912). A Princess of the Italian Reformation, Giulia Gonzaga, 1513–1566, her family and her friends. Harper & Brothers, London 1912.
(1914). Men and Women of the Italian Reformation. London. Stanley Paul & Co.
(1915). Life and Letters in the Italian Renaissance. London. Stanley Paul & Co.

Novels
(1891). The Quest of Jack Hazelwood. 1 vol. London. Wells, Gardner, Darton.
(1892) Cousin Isabel: A Tale of the Siege of Londonderry. 1 vol. 1 vol. London. Wells, Gardner, Darton.
(1895) A Loyal Heart: A Tale of the Cornish Coast. 1 vol. 1 vol. London. Wells, Gardner, Darton.
(1896). Countess Helena. 1 vol. London. Wells, Gardner, Darton.
(1896). Down the Village Street: Scenes in a West Country Hamlet. 1 vol. Edinburgh. Blackwood.
(1897). As We Sow: A West Country Drama. 1 vol. London. Osgood, McIlvaine.
(1898) The Child of the Lighthouse: A Tale of the Great War. 1 vol. London. Wells, Gardner, Darton.
(1898) Broken Arcs: A West Country Chronicle. 1 vol. London. Harper and Bros.
(1900) Sylvia's Romance. 1 vol. 1 vol. London. Wells, Gardner, Darton.
(1901) The Life Story of Dinah Kellow. 1 vol. London. Ward, Lock.
(1901). How Cynthia Went A-Maying: A Romance of Long Ago Wherein the Siege of Wardour Castle is Truly Chronicled. 1 vol. London. William Isbister.
(1904). Felicita: A Romance of Old Siena. London. Harper & Brothers.

At the Circulating Library - List of Fiction Titles

Relation

Christopher Hare [pseudonym of Marian Andrews]

Dante the Wayfarer

Dante the Wayfarer (American Edn)