Mary Anne Whitby

Mary Anne Theresa Whitby (1784–1850), née Symonds, was an English writer, landowner, and artist. She became an authority on the cultivation of silkworms, and in the 1830s reintroduced sericulture to the United Kingdom. During the 1840s, she corresponded extensively with Charles Darwin about silkworms, conducting breeding experiments to help develop his theories of natural selection.

Mary Anne Theresa Symonds was born in 1784, the daughter of the Royal Navy officer Captain Thomas Symonds. Her elder brother William later became Surveyor of the Navy. Around the turn of the century she married Captain Thomas Whitby, with whom she had one daughter. Whitby was flag captain for Admiral Sir William Cornwallis. After Cornwallis was removed from command of the Channel Fleet in early 1806, Whitby and his family were invited to live on his Newlands estate at Milford on Sea. Thomas died shortly afterwards, on 6 April 1806, but Mary remained as a companion for Cornwallis during his retirement – he was prone to depression, and as he had spent much of his life at sea, he had few close friends in society and had never married. On his death in July 1819 she was bequeathed almost all of Cornwallis's estate. A small additional bequest went to William Symonds, Mary's brother, who used it to launch a successful career in naval architecture.

Whitby later acquired the Milford Baddesley estate, bringing together a large amount of the holdings in the area. She remained living on the estate for the rest of her life. In 1827 her daughter Theresa married the Hon. Frederick Richard West, the Member of Parliament for Denbigh and a cousin of the Earl De la Warr. Their children took Cornwallis as a middle name; the most notable of these was William Cornwallis-West, who also became a Member of Parliament.

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