Mary Russell Mitford, a minor poet and playwright, was most admired by her contemporaries for her writing in the genre known as the idyll. Her "little pictures," or informal sketches of rural English life, collected under the title Our Village...

Famous in her day for what she herself considered one of her lesser accomplishments, Mary Russell Mitford deserves attention as one of the first women successfully to enter the expanding nineteenth-century marketplace of prose and as the virtual...