Anna Eliza Bray
| Anna Eliza Bray | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Anna Eliza Kempe 25 December 1790 Newington, Surrey |
| Died | 21 January 1883 (aged 92) |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | novelist |
| Notable work | The Borders of the Tamar and Tavy (1836) |
Anna Eliza Bray (25 December 1790 – 21 January 1883) was a British novelist.
Anna Eliza Kempe was born in the parish of Newington, Surrey, on 25 December 1790, to John Kempe, a bullion porter in the Royal Mint, and Ann, daughter of James Arrow of Westminster. Kempe planned to be an actress, and her public appearance at the Bath Theatre was duly announced for 27 May 1815. She caught a severe cold on her journey, which prevented her appearance, and the opportunity was lost. In February 1818, she married Charles Alfred Stothard, son of the distinguished painter Thomas Stothard R.A.. They journeyed to France, and her first work consisted of Letters written during a Tour in Normandy, Brittany, &c., in 1818.
As an artist, her husband was devoted to illustrating the sculptured monuments of Great Britain, but on 28 May 1821 he died from a fall off a ladder in Bere Ferrers church, Devon, while collecting materials for his work, The Monumental Effigies of Great Britain. She had one child by him, a daughter (born 29 June 1821, died on 2 February 1822). In 1823 she produced a memoir of her late husband, and she undertook to complete the book he had left unfinished, with the aid of her brother Alfred John Kempe. She eventually achieved this aim and the work was published in 1832. At her death she left to the British Museum the original drawings of his great work.
Many years later she provided the Gentleman's Magazine and Blackwood's Magazine with reminiscences of her father-in-law, Thomas Stothard, R.A., and these were afterwards (1851) expanded into a life of that artist.
A year or two after Stothard died, Anna Eliza married Edward Atkyns Bray, the vicar of . She then began writing novels, and from 1826 to 1874, produced at least a dozen. Some of these, such as The Talba, or the Moor of Portugal dealt with foreign life, but she based her most popular novels on the principal families of the counties of Devon and Cornwall, such as the Trelawneys of Trelawne, the Pomeroys, and the Courtenays of Walreddon. They were historical novels, and proved so popular that they were issued in a set of ten volumes by Longmans in 1845-6, and were reprinted by Chapman & Hall as late as 1884.
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