author
Marianne Farningham
1834–1909
A self-taught Victorian writer who turned early struggles into a long, productive literary life, she became known for poems, hymns, biographies, and journalism that reached a wide popular audience. Writing under the name Marianne Farningham, she was one of the few women of her time to rise from a working-class background into the literary world.
2 Audiobooks
Nineteen hundred? A forecast and a story
by Marianne Farningham
Grace Darling, Heroine of the Farne Islands
by Marianne Farningham
About the author
Born Mary Anne Hearn in Farningham, Kent, on December 17, 1834, she grew up in a Baptist family and later took the village name as her best-known pen name. She had little formal schooling, but taught herself with determination and went on to work as a teacher before committing herself fully to writing.
Her career was closely tied to The Christian World, where her poems began appearing in the paper's earliest years and continued for decades. She also wrote prose, biographies, and hymns, sometimes using other names such as Eva Hope, and built a reputation as a religious writer and lecturer during the Victorian period.
What makes her story especially memorable is how unusual it was for a woman from a lower-class background to achieve such visibility in nineteenth-century literary culture. She spent much of her later life in Northampton and remained a steady, hardworking presence in popular religious publishing until her death on March 16, 1909.