Mary Cecil Hay

Mary Cecil Hay
an 1888 translation
Born	1840/1841 Shrewsbury
Died	24 July 1886 East Preston
Nationality	British
Genre	romantic mystery novels

Mary Cecil Hay (1839-1886) was a novelist who grew up in Shropshire, England and spent the final years of her life in a small village on the Sussex coast called East Preston. Her work was often serialised and appeared in periodicals and weeklies in the UK, America and Australia.

Mary Hay, whose middle name was Cecilia, was born in Shrewsbury on the 10 January 1839. Her father was clock maker, Thomas William Hay (1791–1856), who had in 1819 married Mary's mother, Cecilia Carbin (1798-1888). There were six children in the family, three boys and three girls, all baptised in a non-conformist independent church. The eldest boy, Arthur Kenneth (1824–1839), committed suicide at the age of fifteen. The middle son, Walter Cecil Hay FRAM (1828–1905), became an organist and music teacher, whilst the youngest son, Thomas William (1836–1873), followed his father into the clock-making business. Mary and her two sisters, Francis Ann (1830–1884) and Susan Elizabeth (1840-1908) remained unmarried and continued to live at home with their mother. Mary's father died in 1856 aged sixty-five and her mother took control of the business, despite financial difficulties, passing it to her son Thomas in 1872. He became the third generation of clock-makers in the family. After this date Mary, her two sisters and her mother moved to Chiswick and later took a house in West Sussex.

Of the five population censuses that cover Hay's life (1841/51/61/71/81), four show her living at home with her mother and siblings. In 1861 she is not with the family in Shrewsbury, but there is a Mary C. Hay aged 21, born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England, living in Grade, Cornwall. One of Hay's novels, For Her Dear Sake, is part set near the Lizard in Cornwall, a short distance from the Grade and Ruan parishes where she was staying with the family of Rev. Frederick Christian Jackson. Jackson was a competent amateur artist and sold pictures to fund his church, and in 1880 he managed to pursuade Madame Modjeska to put on a staging of Romeo and Juliet in the vicarage gardens to raise funds for the church organ.

Although Hay lived at home with her mother and two sisters she would have come into contact with people involved in the arts and music through her brother, Walter Cecil Hay and his family. Walter was a concert master, a composer, the Diocesan Inspector of Choirs for the Rural Deanery of Shrewsbury, organist at St Chad's Church, Shrewsbury and a music tutor. One of his best known pupils was composer Edward German. In 1855 Walter married Emily Henshaw (1828-1903), whose father, Thomas Northage Henshaw (1799-1871) was the teacher of Writing and Accidence at Shrewsbury School from 1847 to 1870. Emily was a good amateur artist and painted several studies of the old buildings in Shrewsbury, many of which can be seen on the Darwin Country museum and library web site. Emily and Walter's granddaughter was artist Margaret Dovaston. Mary Cecil Hay's knowledge of the arts was reflected in reviews that she wrote for the Royal Academy Exhibition and the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880.