author
Mary E. Mann
1848–1929
Best known for vivid stories of English village life, this late-Victorian writer brought unusual sympathy and sharp observation to the struggles of poor and working people. Her fiction was admired in its day for feeling both local and deeply human.
2 Audiobooks
Mrs. Day's Daughters
by Mary E. Mann
A Sheaf of Corn
by Mary E. Mann
About the author
Born Mary Elizabeth Rackham in Norwich on 14 August 1848, she became known to readers as Mary E. Mann. She married Fairman Joseph Mann, a Norfolk farmer, and much of her writing drew on the rural communities she knew closely.
Mann wrote novels and short stories, and she was especially associated with fiction about poverty and everyday life in the English countryside. She was a well-known novelist in the 1890s and early 1900s, remembered for work that paid careful attention to village customs, hardship, and the inner lives of ordinary people.
She died on 19 May 1929. Although she is less widely read now than some of her contemporaries, her work still offers a rich picture of rural England and of a writer who treated overlooked lives with seriousness and compassion.