Famous in her day for what she herself considered one of her lesser accomplishments, Mary Russell Mitford deserves attention as one of the first women successfully to enter the expanding nineteenth-century marketplace of prose and as the virtual founder of the local-color movement of regional fiction. Her finest work, Our Village (1824-1832), five volumes of sketches of English country life, became a local and international success and generated large numbers of imitations and descendants through the century, both in England and America.

Like many other writers of the later Romantic period, Mitford's literary life spanned many genres; she only reluctantly engaged in the prose work that alone brought her financial success. Mitford began her publishing career with an extensive production of poetry between 1810 and 1813; at the time, she was living in an elegant house outside of Reading, with her father and mother, in relative middle-class comfort. But the...