Lives of the Princesses of England, from the Norman Conquest, Volume 4

by Mary Anne Everett Green

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612 pages, Hardcover

First published September 12, 2013

About the author

Mary Anne Everett Green, née Wood, was an English historian. After establishing a reputation for scholarship with two multi-volume books on royal ladies and noblewomen, she was invited to assist in preparing guides, or "calendars", to a collection of hitherto disorganised historical state papers. In this role of "calendars editor", she participated in the mid-19th century initiative to establish a centralised national archive. She was one of the most respected female historians in Victorian Britain.

Mary Anne Everett Wood was born in Sheffield to a Wesleyan Methodist minister, Robert Wood, and his wife Sarah. Her father was responsible for her education, offering an extensive knowledge of history and languages, and she benefited from mixing with her parents' intellectual friends including James Everett, the minister and writer, after whom she was named.

When the family moved to London in 1841 she began researching in the British Museum and elsewhere, and during the 1840s she worked on Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies (1846) and Lives of the Princesses of England: from the Norman Conquest (1849–1855). She had started work on this book in 1843, using private libraries like that of the rich collector Sir Thomas Phillipps, as well as archives like those at Lambeth Palace. After her marriage to the painter George Pycock Green in 1845, they travelled for the sake of his artistic career, and she was able to research her subject further in Paris and Antwerp. Lives of the Princesses was praised by the antiquary Dawson Turner and by the historian Sir Francis Palgrave among others.

Palgrave, the first Deputy Keeper of the Public Record Office (PRO), had met Green, was impressed with her scholarship, especially her knowledge of languages, and recommended her to his superior John Romilly, the Master of the Rolls. Romilly was continuing Lord Langdale's work of overseeing the establishment of a national archive (the PRO), and publishing some of the documents it held. Numerous state papers which had been assembled from different locations were studied and summarised, and then the abstracts were compiled in chronological order in the form of "calendars".

In 1854 Romilly invited Green to become an external calendars editor. In her first few years doing this work she gave birth to two of her three daughters, one of whom became the novelist Evelyn Everett-Green. Mary Anne Everett Green's son had been born in 1847 but died in 1876. Her husband became disabled and it was important for her to earn an income. While supplementing her work at the PRO with journalism, she pursued some private research but had no time to complete a planned book on the Hanoverian queens.