Mariana Starke was an English author. She is best known for her ground-breaking travel guide of France and Italy which served as an essential companion for British travellers to the Continent in the early nineteenth century. She also wrote plays and poetry early in her career but was discouraged by harsh reviews. She was unmarried but sometimes referred to as Mrs. Starke.

Life and writing career

Starke's mother was Mary (née Hughes) and her father was Richard Starke, governor of Fort St George

Fort St George

Fort St George is the name of the first English fortress in India, founded in 1639 at the coastal city of Madras, the modern city of Chennai. The construction of the Fort provided the impetus for further settlements and trading activity, in what was originally a no man's land...

 in Madras (now known as Chennai

Chennai

Chennai , formerly known as Madras or Madarasapatinam , is the capital city of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, located on the Coromandel Coast off the Bay of Bengal. Chennai is the fourth most populous metropolitan area and the sixth most populous city in India...

). It was here she spent her childhood, background that she used in her plays The Sword of Peace and The Widow of Malabar. Upon the family's return to England they settled in Surrey

Surrey

Surrey is a county in the South East of England and is one of the Home Counties. The county borders Greater London, Kent, East Sussex, West Sussex, Hampshire and Berkshire. The historic county town is Guildford. Surrey County Council sits at Kingston upon Thames, although this has been part of...

. Starke then lived in Italy for an extended period, between 1792 and 1798, in order to attend a sick relation, and this experience formed the basis for her later writing. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars

Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...

 Starke returned to Italy and devoted the rest of her life to continual revisions of her travel series, in so doing effectively reinventing the genre.

Previously travel guides had concentrated on architectural and scenic descriptions of the places to be visited by wealthy young men on the Grand Tour

Grand Tour

The Grand Tour was the traditional trip of Europe undertaken by mainly upper-class European young men of means. The custom flourished from about 1660 until the advent of large-scale rail transit in the 1840s, and was associated with a standard itinerary. It served as an educational rite of passage...

. Starke recognised that with the enormous growth in the number of Britons travelling abroad after 1815 the majority of her readers would now be travelling in family groups and often on a budget. She therefore included for the first time a wealth of advice on luggage, obtaining passports, the precise cost of food and accommodation in each city and even advice on the care of invalid family members. She also devised a system of !!! exclamation mark ratings, a forerunner of today's "stars". Her books, published by John Murray

John Murray (publisher)

John Murray is an English publisher, renowned for the authors it has published in its history, including Jane Austen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lord Byron, Charles Lyell, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman Melville, and Charles Darwin...

, served as a template for later guides. Her work earned her celebrity status in her lifetime. The French author Stendhal

Stendhal

Marie-Henri Beyle , better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism in his two novels Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme...

 in La Chartreuse de Parme refers to a travelling British historian who

>"never paid for the smallest trifle without first looking up its price in the Travels of a certain Mrs Starke, a book which...indicates to the prudent Englishman the cost of a turkey, an apple, a glass of milk and so forth".

Plays

• The British Orphan (unpublished; produced privately in 1791)
• The Sword of Peace; or, a Voyage of Love (produced in London in 1788; Etext)
• The Widow of Malabar. A tragedy in three acts (adaptation from La Veuve de Malabar by Le Mierre; produced in London in 1790)
• The Tournament, a tragedy; imitated from the celebrated German drama, entitled Agnes Bernauer (produced in 1800)

Poetry

• The Poor Soldier; an American tale: founded on a recent fact. Attributed; two editions: London: Printed for J. Walter, 1789
• The Beauties of Carlo Maria Maggi, paraphrased: to which are added Sonnets, by Mariana Starke Exeter: Printed for the author, by S. Woolmer ... and sold by Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, London ; by Upham, and also by Barratt, Bath, 1811

Travel writing

• Letters from Italy, between the years 1792 and 1798 containing a view of the Revolutions in that country (2 vols. London, 1800)
• Travels on the Continent (1820)
• Information and Directions for Travellers on the Continent (1824; expanded and republished as Travels in Europe for the use of Travellers on the Continent and likewise in the Island of Sicily, to which is added an account of the Remains of Ancient Italy in 1832) (658 p; 2 maps)
  • Various translations of the above and pirated editions; last edition issued was in 1839

External links

• O'Quinn, Daniel J. "The Long Minuet as Danced at Coromandel: Character and the Colonial Translation of Class Anxiety in Mariana Starke's The Sword of Peace." British Women Playwrights around 1800. 1 September 2000. 27 pars.
• Purinton, Marjean. "Response to Daniel J. O'Quinn's Essay: Dancing and Dueling in Mariana Starke's Comedy." British Women Playwrights around 1800. 1 September 2000. 13 pars.
• Robinson, Terry F. "Mariana Starke." The Literary Encyclopedia. 29 January 2008.
• Starke, Mariana. The Sword of Peace; or, a Voyage of Love. Eds. Thomas C. Crochunis and Michael Eberle-Sinatra, with an introduction by Jeanne Moskal and a headnote by Jeffrey N. Cox
  Jeffrey N. Cox
  Jeffrey N. Cox is a Professor of English literature and the Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Cox specializes in English and European Romantic literature, cultural theory, and cultural studies...
  
  . British Women Playwrights around 1800. 15 August 1999.