Mary Cholmondeley

Born in Hodnet, Shropshire, on June 8, 1859, Mary Cholmondeley was an English novelist who grew up in a large clerical family. She began writing seriously while still young, and much of her early life was shaped by family duties and by periods of ill health.

She is most closely associated with Red Pottage (1899), the novel that made her name and satirized religious hypocrisy and the narrowness of provincial society. Her work was popular in her lifetime, and she also wrote books including Diana Tempest and the family memoir Under One Roof.

Cholmondeley never married and died in Kensington, London, on July 15, 1925. Though she is less widely read now than some of her contemporaries, she remains a distinctive voice in English fiction, remembered for her intelligence, irony, and clear-eyed view of social life.