author
Mary Cowden Clarke
1809–1898
Best known for making Shakespeare easier to navigate, she turned deep reading into a practical tool for generations of readers. Her work as an author and scholar grew out of a lively literary and musical world and helped bring Shakespeare to a wider audience.
1 Audiobook
Little Paulina: Christmas in Russia
by Mary Cowden Clarke
About the author
Born Mary Victoria Novello in London in 1809, she was the eldest daughter of the composer and music publisher Vincent Novello. In 1828 she married Charles Cowden Clarke, and the two became closely linked through their literary interests, especially their work on Shakespeare.
She is most often remembered for compiling The Complete Concordance to Shakespeare, a landmark reference work first published in the 1840s. She also wrote The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, a series that imaginatively explored the early lives of Shakespeare's female characters and showed her gift for combining scholarship with storytelling.
Cowden Clarke spent her later years in Italy and died there in 1898. Her reputation rests on both her literary writing and her patient, pioneering scholarship, which helped make Shakespeare's language and characters more accessible to ordinary readers.