Annie Armitt (1850 – 30 November 1933) was an English novelist, poet, short story writer, and essayist. She was also one of the founders of a school in Eccles, England.

Early years

Annie Maria Armitt was born in

Salford Salford ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city in Greater Manchester, England, on the western bank of the River Irwell which forms its boundary with Manchester city centre. Landmarks include the former Salford Town Hall, town hall, ...

, England, in 1850. She was the middle of three gifted daughters of William and Mary Ann (Whalley) Armitt. The sisters were all well educated. Armitt, who knew from an early age that she wanted to be a writer, studied English literature at Islington House Academy in

, which trained people to teach according to the Pestalozzian principles. Her older sister

Sophie Sophie is a feminine given name, another version of Sophia, from the Greek word for "wisdom". People with the name Born in the Middle Ages * Sophie, Countess of Bar (c. 1004 or 1018–1093), sovereign Countess of Bar and lady of Mousson * Soph ...

took to botany and would later become a nature writer. Her younger sister Mary Louisa (known as Louie) excelled at music and natural history. She later wrote (mainly for periodicals) on topics ranging from ornithology to local history.

Founding a school

Armitt travelled to Paris in 1866 with Sophie to study French, but the following year her father died unexpectedly and she returned to England. Armitt and her sisters then established a school in Eccles, Lancashire. In 1877, Armitt married Stanford Harris, a physician. The couple went to live near

Hawkshead Hawkshead is a village and civil parish in Westmorland and Furness, Cumbria, England. It lies within the Lake District National Park and was historically part of Lancashire. The parish includes the hamlets of Hawkshead Hill, to the north west, ...

, but neither of them was well and the marriage was unhappy.

Literary work

Armitt published her first novel, ''The Garden at Monkholme,'' in 1878. It was critically well received, with ''

The Westminster Review The ''Westminster Review'' was a quarterly British publication. Established in 1823 as the official organ of the Philosophical Radicals, it was published from 1824 to 1914. James Mill was one of the driving forces behind the liberal journal un ...

'' praising it as "a new departure in fiction" for its focus on characters who were unattractive and for Armitt's ability to make drama out of commonplace events. Similarly, ''The Scottish Review'' admired it for Armitt's outstanding depiction of character. Her 1885 novel ''In Shallow Waters'' was praised for its compelling depiction of the self-sacrificing protagonist, Henry Dilworth. An excerpt from this novel gives a sense of Armitt's dry, Austenian style at its best: :"She did not admire clever girls, and was never enthusiastic in her praise of good ones—those at least, who were specially marked out as such by their parochial visitations and love of week-day services...She was inclined to insinuate that any one who made a very visible application of herself to heavenly things must be drawn thereto by a lack of earthly prosperity." Armitt also published poems, short stories, and essays including a brief life of

Mary Shelley Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley ( , ; ; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel ''Frankenstein, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'' (1818), which is considered an History of science fiction# ...

. The poet

Robert Browning Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian literature, Victorian poets. He was noted for irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentar ...

wrote that he was impressed by some of her poems.

Old age

In 1882, Armitt's sisters came to live near Hawkshead in the town of Rydal, and after being widowed, Armitt joined them there in 1894. The sisters lived together until Sophie and Louie died in 1908 and 1911. Armitt survived her sisters by two decades, dying in 1933.

Selected novels

''The Garden at Monkholme''
(1870) *''Man and His Relatives: A Question of Morality'' (1885)
''In Shallow Waters''
(1885)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Armitt, Annie 1850 births 1933 deaths English women writers Writers from Salford People from Hawkshead