S. C. Hall

Anna Maria Hall (6 January 1800 – 30 January 1881) was an Irish novelist who often published as "Mrs. S. C. Hall". She married Samuel Carter Hall, a writer on art, who described her in Retrospect of a Long Life, from 1815 to 1883. She was born Anna Maria Fielding in Dublin, but left Ireland for England at the age of 15.

Life

Hall was born in Dublin on 6 January 1800. She lived with her mother, a widow named Sarah Elizabeth Fielding, and stepfather, George Carr of Graigie, Wexford, until 1815. Mother and daughter came to England in 1815. 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" This ties Anna Maria to other pupils of Rowden, such as later Rosina Doyle Wheeler; Caroline Ponsonby, later Lady Caroline Lamb; the poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon ("L.E.L."); and Emma Roberts, the travel writer.

On 20 September 1824, Anna Maria married Samuel Carter Hall. Her mother lived with them in London until she died.

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. 35–41 et seq. Other tales followed. Eventually they were collected into a volume entitled Sketches of Irish Character, 1829, and henceforth she was an author by profession. The next year, she issued a little volume for children, Chronicles of a School-Room, consisting of a series of simple tales.

In 1831, Hall published a second series of 'Sketches of Irish Character', fully equal to the first, which was well received. The first of her nine novels, The Buccaneer (1832), is a story of the time of the Protectorate, and Oliver Cromwell is among the characters. 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 Theatre in 1838. Hall also wrote The French Refugee, produced at the St. James's Theatre in 1836, where it ran for 90 nights, and for the same theatre Mabel's Curse, in which John Pritt Harley played the leading part.