Mary Martha Sherwood - Early Life

Early Life

Sherwood was born on 6 May 1775, in Stanford-on-Teme, Worcestershire, as the eldest daughter and second child of Martha Butt and Reverend George Butt, the chaplain in ordinary to George III. In her autobiography, Sherwood describes herself as an imaginative and playful child. She composed stories in her head before she could write and begged her mother to copy them down. Sherwood remembered her childhood as a delightful time filled with exciting "adventures" undertaken with her brother. She even makes the best of the "stocks" that she was forced to stand in while she did her lessons:

It was the fashion then for children to wear iron collars round the neck, with back-boards strapped over the shoulders. To one of these I was subjected from my sixth to my thirteenth year. I generally did all my lessons standing in stocks, with this same collar round my neck; it was put on in the morning, and seldom taken off till late in the evening . . . And yet I was a very happy child, and when relieved from my collars I not unseldom manifested my delight by starting from our hall-door and taking a run for half a mile through the woods.

Sherwood's education was wide-ranging for a girl during the late eighteenth century: she learned Latin and Greek and was permitted to read freely in her father's library.

Sherwood states in her autobiography that she was tall and ungainly for her age and that she hid in the woods with her doll to escape visitors. But she seems to have enjoyed attending Madame St. Quentin's School for Girls at Reading Abbey, the same school Jane Austen had attended. Sherwood's autobiography relates that her generally happy childhood was marred only by the intrusion of the French Revolution, particularly since Reading Abbey was run by French émigrés.

Sherwood spent some of her teenage years in Lichfield, where she enjoyed the company of the eminent naturalist Erasmus Darwin, the educational reformer Richard Lovell Edgeworth, his daughter Maria Edgeworth — who later became a famous writer in her own right — and the celebrated poet Anna Seward. Although she was intellectually stimulated by this group of gifted writers, she was distressed by their lack of faith and later described Richard Edgeworth as an "infidel." She also criticized Seward's persona of the female author, writing in her autobiography that she would never model herself after a woman who wore a wig and accumulated male flatterers. Despite what she viewed as the pitfalls of fame, she was determined to become a writer and when she was seventeen her father, who encouraged her writing, helped her publish her first story, Traditions (1795).

When Sherwood's father died in 1795, her family retired from its active social life, since her mother preferred seclusion, and moved to Bridgnorth, Shropshire. At Bridgnorth Sherwood began writing sentimental novels; in 1802 she sold Margarita for £40 to Mr. Hazard of Bath, and The History of Susan Grey, a Pamela-like novel, for £10. During this time she also taught at a local Sunday school.

Over half of Sherwood's autobiography is devoted to nostalgically reflecting on her childhood years. The majority of the remaining text is dedicated to the difficult early years of her marriage, particularly those spent in India.