(Margaret) Emily Shore (25 December, 1819–1839) was a young

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diarist.

Life

Margaret Emily Shore was born in

Bury St Edmunds Bury St Edmunds (), commonly referred to locally as ''Bury,'' is a cathedral as well as market town and civil parish in the West Suffolk District, West Suffolk district, in the county of Suffolk, England.OS Explorer map 211: Bury St. Edmunds an ...

Suffolk Suffolk ( ) is a ceremonial county in the East of England and East Anglia. It is bordered by Norfolk to the north, the North Sea to the east, Essex to the south, and Cambridgeshire to the west. Ipswich is the largest settlement and the county ...

Christmas Day Christmas is an annual festival commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, observed primarily on December 25 as a religious and cultural celebration among billions of people around the world. A liturgical feast central to Christianity, Chri ...

, 1819 to Thomas Shore and his wife, Margaret Ann (née Twopenny). She was the eldest of 5 children: having two younger sisters, Arabella (b.1822); Louisa (b.1824), and brothers, Richard (b.1821), and Mackworth (b.1825). She kept a journal from the age of eleven until her death from

consumption Consumption may refer to: * Eating *Resource consumption *Tuberculosis, an infectious disease, historically known as consumption * Consumer (food chain), receipt of energy by consuming other organisms * Consumption (economics), the purchasing of n ...

at the age of nineteen. Her diary is less a diary and more a journal, as she herself called it: recording her thoughts on a wide range of subjects.L. H. Cust, ‘Shore, Louisa Catherine (1824–1895)’, rev. Megan A. Stephan, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 200
accessed 15 Nov 2014
/ref> Margaret – who went by the name of Emily – was credited with educating her two younger sisters,

Arabella ''Arabella'', Op. 79, is a lyric comedy, or opera, in three acts by Richard Strauss to a German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, their sixth and last operatic collaboration. Performance history It was first performed on 1 July 1933 at the D ...

and Louisa Catherine Shore.Barbara T. Gates, ‘Shore, (Margaret) Emily (1819–1839)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 200
accessed 15 Nov 2014
/ref> Emily Shore moved to

Funchal, Madeira Funchal () officially Funchal City (), is the capital, largest city and a Municipality (Portugal), municipality in Portugal's Madeira, Autonomous Region of Madeira, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean. The city has a population of 105,795, making it ...

, with her family at the end of her life in search of a healthier climate. She died there in 1839. Her final journal is a descriptive account of life in Funchal. Extracts of her journal were published by her sisters Louisa and Arabella in 1891, more than fifty years after her death. A second edition was published in 1898. Today only some parts of her journal are extant, but in 1991 it was discovered that Arabella had left two of her sister's journals to the

British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...

. These journals are now in the United States, as they were not delivered at the time. These journals reveal that Emily's autobiography was, to a degree, converted into a biography by her then elderly sisters.Introduction
Self-writing as Legacy: The Journal of Emily Shore, Barabara Timms Gates, University of Virginia, retrieved November 2014

Legacy

The University of Virginia Press have digitized Emily Shore's diaries to show how her sisters censored her original thoughts, what Emily Shore herself censored in her diary, and what was actually cut out of the original diary. Alternative country band

The Handsome Family The Handsome Family is an American music duo consisting of husband and wife Brett and Rennie Sparks formed in Chicago, Illinois, and as of 2001 based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They are perhaps best known for their song " Far from Any Road" fro ...

recorded a song based on the diaries, "Emily Shore 1819–1839", on their 1996 album ''Milk and Scissors''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Shore, Emily 1819 births 1839 deaths 19th-century English diarists 19th-century English women writers British women diarists Writers from Bury St Edmunds Tuberculosis deaths in Portugal 19th-century deaths from tuberculosis English expatriates in Portugal