Mary Berry (writer, born 1763)

Mary Berry (16 March 1763 – 20 November 1852) was an English non-fiction writer born in Kirkbridge, North Yorkshire. She is best known for her letters and journals, namely Social Life in England and France from the French Revolution, published in 1831, and Journals and Correspondence, published after her death in 1865. Berry became notable through her association with close friend Horace Walpole, whose literary collection she, along with her sister and father, inherited.

Berry was born in Kirkbridge, Yorkshire on 16 March 1763. Her younger sister Agnes, who proved to be Mary's closest confidant during her life, was born fourteen months later on 29 May 1764.

Their father, Robert Berry, was the nephew of a successful Scottish merchant named Ferguson. Robert received £300,000 in mid-life and bought an estate at Raith in Fifeshire. As the older son of Ferguson's sister, he began working at his uncle's counting-house in Broad Street, Austin Friars. In 1762, he married his distant cousin, a Miss Seaton. After giving birth to Mary and Agnes, she and their third child died three years later, in 1767, during childbirth.

Following their mother's death, the two girls were cared for by their grandmother, Mrs. Seaton, at Askham in Yorkshire. They were moved to the College House in Chiswick in 1770. After their governess at Chiswick married in 1776, the two girls were self-educated. Their religious instruction consisted of Mary reading aloud a Psalm to her grandmother every morning, and one of the Saturday papers from the Spectator every Sunday.

In 1781, the uncle, Mr. Ferguson, died at age 93. He left money to both Robert and his younger brother, William. In 1783, Robert Berry and his two young daughters traveled abroad to Holland, Switzerland and Italy. Mary assumed the role of protective mother to her sister, and a guide and monitor to her father.

Mary Berry began writing Journals and Correspondence while in Florence in 1783, though she would not complete the writing until 70 years later. After a long stay in Italy, her tour was completed by a return home through France to England in June 1786.

Berry and her sister Agnes had a remarkable association with Horace Walpole. They first met him in the winter of 1788, when he was then more than 70 years old. A letter he wrote in October 1788 related how: “he had just then willingly yielded himself up to their witcheries on meeting them at the house of his friend Lady Herries, wife of the banker in St. James's Street”. Walpole developed a deep fondness for the two girls, lavishing them with endearments and compliments. In his letters, Walpole spoke of both in terms of the strongest affection and endearment, in one instance addressing them as his "twin wives". He wrote books solely for their pleasure and dedicated other writings to them. It was solely for their amusement that he wrote his Reminiscences of the Courts of George I and II (1789). He established the sisters at Teddington in 1789, and two years later, in 1791, he prevailed upon them to move into Little Strawberry Hill, a house previously known as Cliveden, the abode of his friend Kitty Clive, the famous actress. They lived there for many years.

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