(Margaret) Emily Shore (1819–1839) was a young

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national id ...

diarist.

Life

Margaret Emily Shore was born in Bury St Edmunds,

Suffolk Suffolk () is a ceremonial county of England in East Anglia. It borders Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south; the North Sea lies to the east. The county town is Ipswich; other important towns include L ...

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 feast central to the Christian liturgical year ...

, 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: *Resource consumption *Tuberculosis, an infectious disease, historically * Consumption (ecology), receipt of energy by consuming other organisms * Consumption (economics), the purchasing of newly produced goods for curre ...

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 () is the largest city, the municipal seat and the capital of Portugal's Autonomous Region of Madeira, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean. The city has a population of 105,795, making it the sixth largest city in Portugal. Because of its hig ...

, 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 public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docume ...

. These journals are now in America 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" from ...

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

References

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