Anna Maria Hall

Anna Maria Hall
Anna Maria Hall, ca. 1875
Born	Anna Maria Fielding (1800-01-06)6 January 1800 Dublin, Leinster, Ireland
Died	30 January 1881(1881-01-30) (aged 81) Devon Lodge, East Moulsey
Pen name	Mrs. S.C. Hall
Occupation	Writer (novelist)
Nationality	Irish
Period	19th century
Genre	Children's literature

Anna Maria Hall (6 January 1800 – 30 January 1881) was an Irish novelist who often published as "Mrs. S. C. Hall". She married Samuel Carter Hall, the writer on art, who described her in Retrospect of a Long Life, from 1815 to 1883. She was born Anna Maria Fielding in Dublin, but left Ireland at the age of 15.

Hall was born in Dublin on 6 January 1800. She lived with her mother, a widow named Sarah Elizabeth Fielding, and stepfather, George Carr of Graigie, Wexford, until 1815. The daughter came to England with her mother in 1815, and on 20 September 1824, married Samuel Carter Hall. Her mother lived with her in London until she died.

Mrs. Hall's first recorded contribution to literature is an Irish sketch called 'Master Ben,' which appeared in The Spirit and Manners of the Age, January 1829, pp. 35–41 et seq. Other tales followed. Eventually they were collected into a volume entitled Sketches of Irish Character, 1829, and henceforth she became 'an author by profession.' Next year she issued a little volume for children, Chronicles of a School-Room, consisting of a series of simple tales.

In 1831, she published a second series of 'Sketches of Irish Character' fully equal to the first, which was well received. The first of her nine novels, The Buccaneer, 1832, is a story of the time of the protectorate, and Cromwell is among the characters. To the New Monthly Magazine, which her husband was editing, she contributed Lights and Shadows of Irish Life, articles which were republished in three volumes in 1838. The principal tale in this collection, 'The Groves of Blarney,' was dramatised with considerable success by the author with the object of supplying a character for Tyrone Power, and ran for a whole season at the Adelphi in 1838. Mrs. Hall also wrote 'The French Refugee,' produced at the St. James's Theatre in 1836, where it ran ninety nights, and for the same theatre Mabel's Curse, in which John Pritt Harley sustained the leading part.

Another of her dramas, of which she had neglected to keep a copy, was Who's Who? which was in the possession of Tyrone Power (1795–1841) when he was lost in the President in April 1841. In 1840, she issued what has been called the best of her novels, Marian, or a Young Maid's Fortunes, in which her knowledge of Irish character is again displayed in a style equal to anything written by Maria Edgeworth. Her next work was a series of 'Stories of the Irish Peasantry,' contributed to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, and afterwards published in a collected form. In 1840 she aided her husband in a book chiefly composed by him, 'Ireland, its Scenery, Characters, &c.' She edited the 'St. James's Magazine,' 1862–3.