SCHIMMELPENNINCK, Mary Anne, [née Galton]. The Life of Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck. Edited by her relation Christiana C. Hankin. In Two Volumes. First edition. Vol I. Autobiography. Vol II. Biographical Sketch and Letters. xi, [1], 345, [1]p; ix, [1], 275, [1]p., half-titles., portrait frontispiece., adverts printed onto inner boards. A fine copy bound in original brown blind stamped cloth, gilt lettered spine, bookseller's ticket of 'T. Edmondson', and binders ticket on final blank of 'Edmonds and Remnants'. Ownership signature on verso of the first end-paper of volume I of S. Hornby, Dalton Hall, [Westmoreland], and with the Hornby family embossed crest on the half-titles. Scarce, 8vo. Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1858. ~ Mary was born into the Galton family of Birmingham in 1778, and her father Samuel Galton jnr. was a member of the Lunar Society. She was encouraged to write by Hannah More, and the family enjoyed a wide circle of friends, including Edgeworth, Day, Priestly, and Erasmus Darwin. In 1806 she married Lambert Schimmelpenninck, a Dutch shipping merchant, and moved to Bristol to be with him there. Unfortunately there was a dispute with the Galton family about her marriage settlement, and eventually they cut off contact. She then began to write in earnest to earn money. The first volume comprises the unfinished memoirs of her life until the age of twenty, dictated when Schimmelpenninck was in her seventies to her niece, Christiana Hankin. The second part is Hankin’s reconstruction of her life thereafter until her death in 1856 from the fragmentary correspondence, journal fragments and miscellaneous writings left among her papers. This copy was read by Sarah Hornby (1804-1886), in the November after its publication in late June. It is dated November 1858 on the end-paper and also respectively Nov 6th & 19th at the end of each volume. Sarah’s copy of Gleanings from the Menagerie and Aviary at Knowsley Hall, presented to her by Lord Derby, was sold at Christie’s in 1998.