Marianne Farningham

Mary Anne Hearn (17 December 1834 – 16 March 1909) who wrote under the nom de plumes Marianne Farningham in The Christian World and for A Working Woman's Life, Eva Hope, and Marianne Hearn, was a British religious writer of poetry, biographies, prose and hymns. She was one of the few female writers in the Victorian period to emerge from the lower classes.

Life

Mary Anne Hearn was born in Farningham in Kent in 1834 to Joseph Hearn and Rebecca Bowers, a religious Nonconformist couple in the Baptist denomination. In her memoir, she describes her thankfulness at having been raised in the country in a loving, devout, and amusing family. She tells the following anecdote about her father, a deacon and teetotaler who worked as a merchant:My father was very fond of his bees, and he and they were good friends. I remember once he took me up with him to perform a curious little ceremony. He had lost a cousin, and he told me he was going to inform the bees, and they would say they were sorry. He tapped the hive, and then said in a low, quiet voice, "My cousin is dead," and I felt a cold shiver pass over me, as I distinctly heard a wailing response like a buzzing moan from the bees.According to Hearn, her first piece of poetry was "an epitaph on a dead toad which we found in the garden, and which we put in a match-box and buried with great solemnity." Faced with their daughter's increasing desperation to learn how to read, Joseph and Rebecca allowed her to visit the pastor's daughter, Isabella, for basic lessons. Besides this, she was home-schooled, taught to perform domestic chores at home and to reflect on Bible stories to gain wisdom, as her family did not approve of the National School.