Anna Eliza Bray

Anna Eliza Bray
Born	Anna Eliza Kempe (1790-12-25)25 December 1790 Newington, Surrey
Died
Nationality	British
Occupation	novelist
Notable work	The Borders of the Tamar and Tavy (1836)

Anna Eliza Bray (25 December 1790 – 21 January 1883) was a British novelist.

Biography

Anna Eliza Kempe was born in the parish of Newington, Surrey, on 25 December 1790, to John Kempe, a bullion porter in the Royal Mint, and Ann, daughter of James Arrow of Westminster. Kempe planned to be an actress, and her public appearance at the Bath Theatre was duly announced for 27 May 1815. She caught a severe cold on her journey, which prevented her appearance, and the opportunity was lost. In February 1818, she married Charles Alfred Stothard, son of the distinguished painter Thomas Stothard R.A.. They journeyed to France, and her first work consisted of Letters written during a Tour in Normandy, Brittany, &c., in 1818.

As an artist, her husband was devoted to illustrating the sculptured monuments of Great Britain, but on 28 May 1821 he died from a fall off a ladder in Bere Ferrers church, Devon, while collecting materials for his work, The Monumental Effigies of Great Britain. She had one child by him, a daughter (born 29 June 1821, died on 2 February 1822). In 1823 she produced a memoir of her late husband, and she undertook to complete the book he had left unfinished, with the aid of her brother Alfred John Kempe. She eventually achieved this aim and the work was published in 1832. At her death she left to the British Museum the original drawings of his great work.

Many years later she provided the Gentleman's Magazine and Blackwood's Magazine with reminiscences of her father-in-law, Thomas Stothard, R.A., and these were afterwards (1851) expanded into a life of that artist.

A year or two after Stothard died, Anna Eliza married Edward Atkyns Bray, the vicar of Tavistock. She then began writing novels, and from 1826 to 1874, produced at least a dozen. Some of these, such as The Talba, or the Moor of Portugal dealt with foreign life, but she based her most popular novels on the principal families of the counties of Devon and Cornwall, such as the Trelawneys of Trelawne, the Pomeroys, and the Courtenays of Walreddon. They were historical novels, and proved so popular that they were issued in a set of ten volumes by Longmans in 1845-6, and were reprinted by Chapman & Hall as late as 1884.

Her second husband died in 1857, and she then moved to London, where she selected and edited some of his poetry and sermons, before returning to original work. Her last years were embittered by a report that during a visit to Bayeux in 1816, she stole a piece of the Bayeux Tapestry. However, her character was cleared by correspondence and leading articles that appeared in the Times. She died in London on 21 Jan. 1883. Her autobiography, to 1843, was published by her nephew, John A. Kempe, in 1884, but it is sketchy, and less than accurate. It depicts an accomplished and kindly woman, proud of her own creations, and enthusiastic in praise of the literary characters she knew.

Works

Bray wrote many other works in addition to those mentioned above. These include The Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy (1836, 3 vols.), which describes, in a series of letters to Southey, the traditions, legends and superstitions that surround the town of Tavistock, on the borders of the River Tamar and the River Tavy. It was reviewed by Southey himself in the Quarterly Review. The remainder copies were issued with a new title-page by H. G. Bohn in 1838, and a new edition, compressed by Mrs. Bray herself into two volumes, appeared in 1879. Also connected with South West England are a series of tales for 'young people' on the romantic legends connected with Dartmoor and North Cornwall, entitled, A Peep at the Pixies, or Legends of the West (1854).

In 1841, her The Mountains and Lakes of Switzerland, with Notes on the Route there and back was published, and after a silence of some years she issued three compilations in French history in 1870, The Good St. Louis and his Times, The Revolt of the Protestants of the Cevennes, and Joan of Arc. These were reported by the author of her entry in the Dictionary of National Biography in 1886 to be "pleasantly written, but lacked historical research that could have made them of permanent value".

Among her other works are Branded, Trelawney, and The White Hoods: an Historical Romance.

Further reading

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•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cousin, John William (1910). "Bray, Anna Eliza". A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent & Sons. Wikisource