For health's sake the family went into the country, where they became tenants of a tumble-down Cistercian priory on the borders of Salisbury Plain. The numerous girls, with their mother and governess, lived there constantly; the father coming down as often as his business would allow, almost always by the Saturday coach, to spend Sunday. Here the first literary venture was made, when Anne was about seventeen. It was a short dialogue on a serious subject, which a young aunt managed to get accepted in St. Paul's Churchyard; and, as Miss Manning candidly avows, was so well advertised privately by her fond grandfather that—such were the palmy days of authorship—five hundred copies brought her in a profit of £60.
The story, "Village Belles," was completed at Tenby, the Priory having become too ruinous for habitation. It was put into the hands of Baldwin and Cradock, and no proofs were sent till the whole of the two first volumes came together. It was introduced to Mr. Manning thus, "Papa, I don't know what you will say, but I have been writing a story."
"Ho! ho! ho!" was his first answer, but he afterwards said, "My dear, I like your story very much"—and never again referred to it.
Her own after judgment was that it was an "incurably young, inexperienced tale which, after all top dressing, remained but daisied meadow grass."
Sorrow came in to fill the minds of the family (to the exclusion of mere fictitious interests) in the deaths within short intervals of two of the sisters, and their mother's invalidism, ending, within a few years, in her death. After this the winters were spent by the three sisters at the Paragon, the summers in a cottage at Penshurst, their father coming down for the Sunday. Anne Manning, meantime, was pursuing studies in painting and was an excellent amateur artist. She was also a botanist, and this has much to do with her accuracy in writing details of country life and habits.
Dates, alas! are wanting both in her own "Passages in the life of an Authoress," and in the recollections of her kind and affectionate biographer, Mrs. Batty; but it seems to have been in 1849 that her "Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell," at first written to amuse herself and her sisters, and afterwards sent to assist a brother in Australia, who was starting a local magazine, was given to the editor of "Sharpe's Magazine," then in its early youth.
It made her fame. Nobody had particularly thought of Milton in his domestic capacity before, except as having advocated divorce and made his daughters read Greek to him, and it was reserved for Miss Manning to make the wife paint her own portrait as the lively, eager girl, happy in country freedom with her brothers, important with her "housewife-skep" in her mother's absence, pleased with dress, but touched by the beautiful countenance and the sudden admiration of the strange visitor. There proves to be a debt which makes her marriage with him convenient to the father, and it is carried out in spite of the mother's strong objections, alike to the suitor's age, his politics, and his puritanism. We go along with the country girl in her disappointment and sense of dreariness in her unaccustomed London life, in the staid and serious household, where she sorely misses her brothers and is soon condemned for love of junketing. Then come her joy in her visit to her home at Forest Hill and her reluctance to return, fortified by her father's disapproval of Milton's opinions. By the time that a visit to some wise relatives has brought her to a better mind and to yearning after her husband, Milton has taken offence and has put forth his plea for divorce, which so angers her father that he will not hear of her return; nor does she go back till after many months and the surrender of Oxford, when on her own impulse she hurries to London, meets her husband unexpectedly, and when he "looks down on her with goodness and sweetness 'tis like the sun's gleams shining after rain."
There Mary Powell's journal ends. It is written in beautiful English, such as might well have been contemporary and could only have been acquired by familiarity with the writers of the period, flowing along without effort or pedantry so as to be a really successful imitation. It crept into separate publication anonymously, and achieved a great success, being in fact the first of many books imitating the like style of autobiography; nor has it ever been allowed to drop into oblivion. It was followed up after a time by "Deborah's Diary," being the record supposed to be kept by Milton's one faithful and dutiful daughter, who lived with him in his old age.
The "fascination of the old style," as she calls it, led her to deal with "The Household of Sir Thomas More" in the person of his noble daughter Margaret. There was a good deal more genuine material here, and she has woven in the fragments from Erasmus and others with great ingenuity, and imitated the style of the fifteenth century as well as she had done that of the seventeenth.