Mary Russell Mitford, a minor poet and playwright, was most admired by her contemporaries for her writing in the genre known as the idyll. Her "little pictures," or informal sketches of rural English life, collected under the title Our Village (1824-1832), were among the most popular works of fiction in the first half of the nineteenth century and continue to be read, for their graceful style, genial tone, and precise observation of nature.

Born on 16 December 1787 in Alresford, Hampshire, Mary Russell Mitford was the only child of Mary Russell, a clergyman's daughter and lineal descendant of the ducal Bedfords, and George Mitford, son of a Northumberland surgeon. Although George Mitford studied for the medical profession and was always referred to as "Dr." Mitford, he seems not to have practiced medicine after his marriage in 1785, settling instead into his wife's Alresford estate and the life of a country gentleman...