Mary Cowden Clarke (22 June 1809 – 12 January 1898) was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

.

She was the eldest daughter of Vincent Novello

Vincent Novello

Vincent Novello , English musician, son of an Italian who married an English wife, was born in London....

. In 1828, she married her father's partner, Charles Cowden Clarke

Charles Cowden Clarke

Charles Cowden Clarke , English author and Shakespearian scholar, was born in Enfield, Middlesex.-Life:His father, John Clarke, was a schoolmaster in Clarke's Academy in Enfield Town, among whose pupils was John Keats. Charles Clarke taught Keats his letters, and encouraged his love of poetry...

, and worked with him on Shakespeare studies.

In the year after her marriage, Mary Cowden Clarke began her valuable Shakespeare concordance

Concordance (publishing)

A concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts. Because of the time and difficulty and expense involved in creating a concordance in the pre-computer era, only works of special importance, such as the Vedas, Bible, Qur'an...

, which was eventually issued in eighteen monthly parts (1844–1845), and in volume form in 1845 as The Complete Concordance to Shakespeare, being a Verbal Index to all the Passages in the Dramatic Works of the Poet. This work superseded the Copious Index to ... Shakespeare (1790) of Samuel Ayscough

Samuel Ayscough

Samuel Ayscough was a librarian and indexer, known as 'The Prince of Indexers'.Ayscough was a cataloguer in the British Museum in the late 18th century, and spent two years working on a catalogue of the manuscript collection...

, and the Complete Verbal Index ... (1805–1807) of Francis Twiss.

Works

• Kit Bam's Adventures: or, The Yarns of an Old Mariner (1849)
• Concordance to Shakespeare 1846
• The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines 1850
• The Iron Cousin 1854
• Florence Nightingale 1857
• World-noted women; or, Types of womanly attributes of all lands and ages. 1858
• Memorial Sonnets 1888
• My long life : an autobiographic sketch 1897

External links

• Image at the National Photo Gallery
• For Mary Cowden Clarke's works http://www.worldcat.org/