Mariana Starke - Life and Writing Career

Life and Writing Career

Starke's mother was Mary (née Hughes) and her father was Richard Starke, governor of Fort St George in Madras (now known as Chennai). It was here she spent her childhood, background that she used in her plays The Sword of Peace and The Widow of Malabar. Upon the family's return to England they settled in Surrey. Starke then lived in Italy for an extended period, between 1792 and 1798, in order to attend a sick relation, and this experience formed the basis for her later writing. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars Starke returned to Italy and devoted the rest of her life to continual revisions of her travel series, in so doing effectively reinventing the genre.

Previously travel guides had concentrated on architectural and scenic descriptions of the places to be visited by wealthy young men on the Grand Tour. Starke recognised that with the enormous growth in the number of Britons travelling abroad after 1815 the majority of her readers would now be travelling in family groups and often on a budget. She therefore included for the first time a wealth of advice on luggage, obtaining passports, the precise cost of food and accommodation in each city and even advice on the care of invalid family members. She also devised a system of !!! exclamation mark ratings, a forerunner of today's "stars". Her books, published by John Murray, served as a template for later guides. Her work earned her celebrity status in her lifetime. The French author Stendhal in La Chartreuse de Parme refers to a travelling British historian who

>"never paid for the smallest trifle without first looking up its price in the Travels of a certain Mrs Starke, a book which...indicates to the prudent Englishman the cost of a turkey, an apple, a glass of milk and so forth".